


Coming

by alephthirteen



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: "Baby Boom" AU, "Boston Marriages", "Mid-Century" AU, "Rocking Sixties" AU, Alien Biology, Alien Culture, Alien Invasion, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Drugs in Religious Ceremonies, F/F, F/M, Fistful of Karas, Kryptonian Drugs, Kryptonians are Imperial, Kryptonite in All the Colors of the Rainbow, Lena Is No One's Housewife, Size Kink, Strip Joints
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:55:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 28,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26498980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: On August 9th, 1945 the atomic age began with the destruction of Hiroshima.  Man had the power only given to gods.  The power of infinite destruction.  Armageddon was bottled.  Ragnarok could be loaded into a gun.  A telephone call could put an end to recorded history.Before the poisoned ruins had dimmed, plans were being made for the next age and the wars to rule it.Humanity learned the meaning of the word "humiliation" on September 15th, 1945 when thirteen metal-shelled cities appeared in the night sky in great flashes of green light and gleaming craft descended.  Panic and reflexive skirmishes followed but before dawn, every army in the world was brought to heel.The atomic age was over.  The new age was not theirs to choose.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Samantha "Sam" Arias/Alex Danvers
Comments: 99
Kudos: 139





	1. Earth Angel (Lena)

**Author's Note:**

> I've fallen down a very deep SuperCorp A/B/O hole lately and I like lots of parts of the genre and loathe others. The idea of a sort of symbiotic relationship between Alphas and Omegas is interesting and the social implications (preschools? family leave? sick leave? assault laws? rape prevention? police needs?) of such a strong, impossible to obscure sexual cycle is incredibly interesting is too often lost in obvious plots of "white knighting" Alphas who save trembling Omegas and just downright nasty Alphas living out non-con fantasies.  
> \-----
> 
> That ain't the Danvers sisters.
> 
> \-----  
> Kryptonians are conquerers here and much more grey than in the shows or comics. They're not stupid or impulsive. I wanted to play into why they would suddenly swoop in and take over a nowhere planet that hadn't even invented jet aircraft yet. First Contact is a massive risk, even for the advanced aliens. Just the risk of disease alone makes it a massive gamble, no matter the medical technology. What logical reason would an interstellar species have to make it? What would conquering earth give you that water-rich asteroids or comets or farming on non-life-bearing planets couldn't?
> 
> Someone to talk to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter titles, added together will comprise a playlist of 1950s-1980s songs.

**Lena - El Paso, Texas - September 1960**

  
  
Lena's mouth is sticky and sour. Her sheets are tangled around her ankles and her hand is sore. Like it was hit with a hammer while she slept.

It _reeks_ in here. Not like when Joe threw soup on her last week or like when Sally sprayed her with cleaning solution in the locker room.

It smells like _animals_ in here, thick and bitter. 

As she tries to get upright, Lena realizes why her hand hurts. She was squeezing it between her thighs all night. Judging by the sloppy wetness on her sheets and a sore between her legs, she has an idea of what her body was trying to do.  
  
There are flecks of blood on the sheets too.

Not only did she touch herself in the night, she must have somehow deflowered herself. Lillian is going to kill her. Marrying her is no longer worth a business contact.

There's a knock on the door and she yelps.

"Ace?" Lex calls. "You all right?"

Lena groans.

"You don't sound good. I'm going to come in, all right?"

The knob rattles.

"No!" Lena yells. "I'll live. It's just...uh... It's my time! Tell mother I'll be down for breakfast."

His rumbling chuckle on the other side makes her hammering heart slow a bit. Life was so much easier before he went off to college.

He doesn't believe her. His monthly care packages come like clockwork, stuffed with chocolates and hard candies from a shop near Harvard square. Hopefully he'll wait for a better lie or the truth. That'd be nice. Getting to tell her brother the truth. 

"About an hour, Ace. Less if you want to walk."

"Thanks!" she yells, hopping out of bed.

Trying to hop out of bed. Her legs bend like noodles and she goes face-first into the hardwood.

"Fuuuuuuck," Lena groans.

She can't stand up and stay up. So she sort of wobbles two steps, drops to her knees, and repeats. She drags herself over to the little cord for the maid and pulls.

Molly is there so fast Lena wonders if she was outside the whole time. Probably some punishment Lillian devised. Put the maid at the beck and call of the girl who never lets the maid help. 

"Glad you final-you don't look good, little lady."

"Help," Lena croaks. "I need to get to school."

Big arms folded over her apron and probably a foot taller than Lena and with her brown hair pulled up in a tight bun, the Dutch matron is not exactly someone she can intimidate right now. 

"Look at the bed. If Lillian knew..."

Molly glances over at the bloody sheets.

"Who's the lucky boy?" she asks Lena. This doesn't seem to be bothering Molly.

Lena shakes her head.

"Girl?" she teases.

Lena shakes again, hoping Molly didn't catch the blush. There are girls. Girls she wishes she could blame it on. Wishes had ravished her. None of them will give her the time of day.

"Prince charming?"

Lena rolls her eyes.

"Fairy godfather? Pirate? Elephant?"

Lena pretends to vomit and then she _does_ and everything in her guts comes out in long strings of grey slime.

"I just woke up sick. I need to go to school." Lena whines. "Lillian doesn't...I'm not worth the cost of food to her after that."

As soon as she finishes saying it, it occurs to Lena that Molly probably cares more about her paycheck than Lena. It would make sense.

"No way you're going to school, young lady. Half a mind to make off with you and raise you with my Jimmy. But, failing that..."

She sighs.

"Your brother's a clever fella. If anyone can make you look less like a wrung-out rag and more like you belong at school, it's him."

"Thanks," Lena gasps.

\-----

Lex had something that helped. He usually does. He said it was some drug Doctor Thomas Wayne developed and that Lex was going to make his fortune with. Something about cycles and taking the edge off and 'visitors' which was probably him avoiding using the word spacemen in Lillian's presence.

Lena really couldn't follow a word.

Her entire world was the smell of the croissant that Lillian was nibbling. It smelled like happiness and puppies and sunshine and _everything_ even from the other end of the long table.

The thermometer in her ear felt like acid being poured in but the needle in her neck just felt _confusing_ to Lena. Like it belonged there, or it would if Lex hadn't done it.

"-re still running pretty hot, Ace. You sure?"

Lena nods.

"That'll do, Lex, we mustn't spoil your friend."

"You mean my sister."

"Don't toy with me boy," Lillian sniffs. "She shares no blood of mine."

"She is blood of _mine_ , Lillian."

"Mother," Lillian hisses. "I am your mother."

"Yes," Lex chuckles. "Well! Pity for you I'm paying my own way in college then. Come on, Ace. I'll drive you."

Lena shakes her head. 

"Walk with my friends," she mumbles. "I want to walk there with my friends."

Lex frowns. 

"Please?"

She tries to bat her eyelashes at him but in her current state she probably messed that up too. For all she knows, she wiggled her ears instead. 

Lex empties like a deflated balloon.

"You're going to worry me into an early grave, sister mine. I suppose grandfather's cane must be around here somewhere..."

He finds it and plops a giant straw hat on her head too.

"I look like a zebra," Lena whines.

"Mmm..." Lex muses.

"Not with the spotted blouse. I think it's more like a mushroom. Black with little spots and a big white thing on top."

"Lex!"

"Fine. Let's find that Kelly person mother is so mad about you seeing. I do so love it when mother is mad at people," he whispers.

Kelly, bless her, is waiting at the end of the driveway with their English book cracked open between long fingers. Her face is shiny in the late summer heat and her long white dress compliments her dark skin. She belongs here, or at least belongs somewhere warm. The sun _likes_ Kelly. It hates Lena.

"You must be Kelly," Lex says, offering his hand.

"Lex."

"What?"

"Lex!" Lena hisses, jerking her head towards the pack of white boys that stalk them to school every day.

"Ah," he replies. "Too used to Boston. Nice to meet you, Kelly."

"Yes, sir."

"Next time, let's catch up, Kelly. See if I can get you to use my name. Keep in touch, Ace. I worry."

"I will."

Kelly tucks the book in her bag and puts an arm around Lena.

"You are about to melt, creampuff. You sure you don't want to sta-"

Lena doesn't even have time to finish raising her eyebrow before Kelly groans.

"Why would you stay home when you were sick? With your family who cares for you? What kind of sense would that make?" 

Lena walks a half-step behind and never lets go. These boys aren't keen on grabbing a white woman and if Lena sticks close and stays in their way, nothing happens.

They came after Kelly, once. Kelly said it was 'nothing new' but Lena's been having nightmares about it for a month.

One of them grabbed her and before his hand came down one of the spacemen dropped from the sky, caught the boy's fist and hoisted him into the air. Then he asked Kelly if she was all right and led Lena and Kelly away. Another stayed to hand the boy off to the police, who probably bought the kid a beer before letting him go.

They mean well, the spacemen. Lena thinks they just don't understand. They stopped him from hitting Kelly because they know that people shouldn't get hurt but they didn't do more on the spot because they didn't see a pattern. They didn't realize she was getting hurt because she was a black girl walking with a white girl in Texas.

They're zookeepers, not really understanding what's in human heads. They practically admitted in it the paper yesterday. This 'General Astra' woman said they only came to Earth to prevent humans from waging atomic war on each other and she pledged to only take action when inaction risked human life.

Lena suspects that will change as the reports pile up. As that hotline number gets called more and more. 

When it does? When the spacemen realize what the animals are like?

She's not sure but she thinks the One Night War is going to look like a block party.

\-----

The coach's shrill whistle slices through Lena's fog. 

"Oh shit."

The four-bully team known as the Blonde Squad took advantage of her fuzz-filled head and backed her into a corner of the bleachers. They each have a dodge ball in each hand and a stack of them on the benches behind them. Stacy's nostrils are flaring and her teeth are clenched.

"Stay away from Johnny!" she shrieks.

Lena ranks Johnny somewhere below brain cancer in things she's eager to try but that isn't going to help if she says it to Stacy.

"Fuck yo-"

\-----

"Miss Luthor?" 

The voice is very far away. Lena wants it closer.

"Miss Luthor?"

Maybe it's a little closer now. That would be nice.

The voice is pink and it's near a big shiny yellow thing and two blue ones. The voice smells _really_ good and Lena is _really_ hungry.

"Miss Luthor, are you all right?"

\-----

Lena wakes with a hiss of pain.

"Shh, shh, shh..."

Her eyes are wet and one is swollen shut. The Blondes did a number on her this time.

"Kelly?"

"Yeah. You're in a hospital, Lena. Do you remember?"

"They thought I was going to date Johnny..."

Kelly pulls a face.

"Smelly Johnny? Gross! When you didn't come back to your house, I worried. Next day, I started asking."

"Lex?" Lena asks. "He knows?"

Kelly nods.

"He's on the next plane back, he said."

With a lot of help from Kelly, she gets up halfway.

This is _not_ an ordinary hospital. It smells like the ocean and like a summer storm and everything is either blue or silver and other than that pencil, Lena doesn't see a single right angle or straight line.

"What hospital?"

There's a knock at the door. A dark-haired woman with a single white lock of hair is leaning in it. Lena forces herself up higher.

"Easy!" Kelly scolds.

"It's all right, young lady. I think Miss Luthor is merely reacting to my scent."

Kelly turns her head towards the stranger.

"What? Why would she be? I can't smell anything. Can't smell your perfume."

"Lena? What do I smell like, to you?"

Lena should be able to answer this.

"You smell calm. Like it's safe if I'm near you. But you also smell like someone I should listen to, obey."

The stranger nods.

"My name is Alura El and I'm in charge of the doctors here. So obey me when I tell you to lie back, please."

Lena does.

"Weird," Kelly huffs.

"May I borrow this chair, Miss Olsen?"

"Sure. Not like I could stop you," Kelly jokes, waving at the five-sided symbol on the woman's suit.

Shiny everything. Those spaceman symbols on her doctors clothing. Lena not being beaten to death. 

"So this is a spaceman hospital."

"Yes. We got that from an old film broadcast our probes picked up. Among friends, we call ourselves by our actual name. You are humans. We are Kryptonians."

"Right."

Lena groans.

"Can this wait until my brain is working?" she pleads.

"Not all of it can wait, Lena. There's a few things you need to know."

Lena swallows.

"All right."

"Firstly, I want to ask how much you know about your mother. Birth mother. Her physical appearance. We have the rest."

"She..." Lena sighs. "Green eyes. I remember that. Red, maybe orange hair. She liked to sing to me. She was soft."

Alura hums and jots something down. Another woman is standing in the door now, with the same color of hair except for the braided lock being on the other side. This woman smells like iron and salt and Lena's fists clench. She needs to listen to this woman! 

Kelly shoves her back in the bed.

"Relax, little one. Relax..." the newcomer purrs. "My name is General Astra. If I need you to do something, I will use my words."

Lena nods.

Alura takes her hand.

"Lena, before you were assaulted, your body went through a change we call 'presenting'. Most likely triggered by encountering a member of our species in mid cycle, whether heat or rut. In our language, _istrun._ It's a rapid form of puberty that occurs in our third gender. Approximately four in ten of our species go through it. Most..."

Alura sighs.

"Most have warning and they eat heavily and seclude themselves during the worst of it. Have a family to help them. You went through it underweight and alone and scared. I'm glad you're still with us."

"Our species?" Lena mumbles. 

"Yes. Your mother was Kryptonian and your father, as you know, was human. It's why I asked you about her appearance. From the sound of it, you're the daughter of Saela Vex-Kann. She was one of my more playful peers."

"What my sister means is that you are one of _five_ children Saela had without alerting the registrar. She was part of our advance party. Monitoring humanity. Saela was killed when she used her ship's engines to collapse a facility that was putting together atom bombs. She took her own life so that humans couldn't destroy themselves. The night before the One Night War. I'm sorry."

"Did she love me?" Lena croaks.

Astra nods.

"She must have. Rather than wait forty-eight hours for reinforcements, she put you in a bunker and eliminated the one thing on this rock that could kill her and crack the bunker. There were robot attendants and food. Everything you needed. Her plan must have been to have us pick you up."

Kelly gives her a shove.

"Of course you'd figure out how to escape a spaceman bunker when you were _four,_ silly girl."

"What else do I need to know?" Lena asks.

"In our culture, there are three genders both physically and mentally and each person has both. Male, female, both and for the others the best translations I can give you would be Alphas, Betas and Omegas. Betas are the majority of us. Physically average but mentally above the average of Alphas or Omegas. Indistinguishable from humans, whether male or female. Their scent glands are active but not something they can consciously control and their libido ad sexual cycle is not drastically different from humans. It's why your father would have seen Saela as a human woman."

"The omegas?"

Alura smiles.

"I'm an Omega, Lena. Like you. We are more fertile and more empathetic than the other two genders. Most of us are male. Six in ten. Three in ten are female like me. One in ten are _aos_ like you, both. Equally productive with a male or female partner. We attach to Alphas and nearly always pair or marry at some point in life. We're drawn to them almost instinctively. Scent and sound, particularly. My husband's heartbeat and his scent are the only things I can think about when I'm having a bad day," she sighs. "I can control my scent. I use my scent to soothe or excite nearby Kryptonians. That's why you smelled that I was safe to be around."

Lena chuckles.

"What?" Kelly demands. 

"It's why she thought I was going after Johnny, right?" 

Alura tilts her head.

"Possibly. We don't actually know how many children like you are out there, Lena. We're new in town," Alura jokes. "Popular. I'm sure that Saela wasn't the only one who took a human for a test drive."

"Alura!" Astra scolds.

"Really, sister? Who is this prude? It's not Astra. She's the alpha who made half the women in the _fleet_ round before we got here."

Astra sighs.

"Sisters."

Lena laughs. Laughing hurts but she's going to do it anyway.

"I wouldn't know, actually."

"You should rest, Lena." 

Alura puts her arms around Kelly's shoulders. 

"Come, Miss Olsen. Let's get you some food and then I'll bring you back to your friend."

There's another knock on the door just before Kelly stands up.

"Is she all right? Is this the right ro-"

Something smells _really_ good right now.


	2. Constant Craving (Lena)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena needs cuddles and Kara is supposed to take responsibility for her actions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kryptonians have lived with their heats, ruts, and the deep and often religious ceremonies of pairing, claiming and helping that go with them for eons. They can no more imagine being puritanical about it than Lena can accept their viewpoint.  
> \-----  
> I decided that the 'alpha brain' was sort of a second train of thought that popped up when the urges were intense. Not really a second personality. Those are italic and bold and ordinary thoughts are italic.

**Lena - City of El - 30000 km altitude in orbit over Metropolis**

  
It hurts. She's burning up and she's been sweaty so long she can feel the slimyness of it. Her guts feel like something is missing. Like her damn liver disappeared and she wants it back. Wants that hollow _gone._ Every now and then Alura or another doctor comes in and pokes Kelly with a finger and makes her wake up for food. Conversations waft past the door and Lena can hear nurses talking to other patients.

> _Would you say you are going up or down right now, little one?_
> 
> _The heat won't get any better if you fight it. Let's get you into the shower, see if you can have some food. I can call him for you._
> 
> _Are you sure? She was willing to help._
> 
> _Get off your knees right this minute, little one! I am not your Alpha!_

She's not sure how she can hear these. If this room is any indication, this place is massive. This room is closer to the size of the parlor at Lillian's sprawling, robber baron home than it is a hospital room.

After shooing Kelly away, Alura leans towards someone just outside the door.

> _Your fault. Your responsibility, daughter. Teach her everything and do nothing. She's deep in heat. Her first. Right now she's not in a state to consent. No matter how she begs, you understand me?_
> 
> _On my honor as a Lady, mother._

A big, tall, _perfect_ body shadows the door. Nearly fills it in fact. Her shoulders are broad and hips are narrow but even in that tight shirt there's no mistaking her for a man. Her hands are broad but the fingers are slim and her nails are painted a beetle-shiny color of blue. Her half-rolled sleeves show tanned skin and cords of muscle and there's hair, impossibly thin and pale until it becomes gold dust when the overhead lights hit it. Her lips are big and pink and she's worrying the bottom one with her teeth. Her hair is like honey, shiny and dripping in waves down her shoulders.

From somewhere Lena doesn't understand comes a shiver and a whine that bursts from her throat without permission.

"Hi," the blonde says.

"Hello," Lena croaks.

"My name is Kara. I'm sorry but I think I triggered you. I wanted to meet you and I'd walk by your house every morning in case I could introduce myself. Meet you when you met your friend."

**_Too far! She is too far! She smells too good. We're wet and she's too dry! She doesn't smell like us! She isn't inside_ _us!_ **

She's not sure why there's a voice in her head but it's hers and it's not and everything is confusing except that Kara smells so good. She smells like something her mother baked that Lena can't remember the name of and she smells like fresh washed sheets for an afternoon nap and like the steam rising off fresh bread.

"What do you mean triggered?" Lena asks, hoping to distract from her new split personality. Her slutty split personality that is trying to make her slump back and make her legs fall open. Anything to be _breathing_ that scent. Tasting it straight off the skin.

"May I sit?" Kara asks, pointing at an empty chair.

"Bring it closer," Lena pleads.

Kara proceeds to just _lift the damn thing_ despite the fact that it's metal and the frame is more like a clamshell than anything. A big cup that a pillow sits in.

"Better?"

Lena hums. Her gut stops twisting so much. The relief is like if she'd actually tore into a chunk of fresh bread, not just smelled it.

"When I said triggered I meant that..."

Kara sighs.

"I'm an Alpha. We're stronger and well, pushier than betas and most omegas. Our senses of smell are as keen as yours and we're able to put out more scent. With omegas and alphas, it's like...those Earth fish. What are they called? The ones that stick to sharks. Keep them clean. Or the fish that clean crocodiles. Together we're a better animal than apart. I wanted to meet you, so bad, Lena. I never saw you but I heard singing in a language I didn't know and three days ago, as I walked by I saw this girl with black hair and white skin brush her hair. Like I was watching a ghost in castle. I guess it kicked me into rut and you caught the scent. Your body decided that it liked the scent which is sort of like my fingerprint. It's unique and it tells your body things about mine. You went into heat."

Lena doesn't think she understands. Kara sighs.

"Here. Don't tell my mother."

She holds out her arm, her tanned, perfect, _delicious_ skin and cups Lena's cheek on the far side, which puts her wrist and the veins there under Lena's nose. Lena can count Kara's heartbeats by the quick spikes in the scent when more blood moves.

The empty ache in her middle is replaced by a rush of hot slickness that puddles the sheets under her. Her skin feels hotter but it feels good. She can't feel the slime anymore.

"See? We each like the way each other smells." 

"So I smell so good to you that you rip my clothes off and tear me apart."

"Never," Kara snarls. "Never. Unless you asked."

Lena can _feel_ that word, not just hear it and that feels so good it has to be trouble. That is not good.

"I will never hurt you, even if..."

Kara sniffles.

"Even if you don't want anything to do with me. I'll be with you. Be your friend. Make sure to live near you. Be available. Give my life for you if I needed to."

Lena's bones have disappeared. There's just some boney-flavored Jello, she thinks. Something that prevents her from deflating but doesn't let her do much else.

"You don't want me!" Lena blurts out. "I...I...I think I'm an invert. A deviant."

Kara cocks her head and it reminds Lena of the dog Lex used to have. Ignatius. A golden-furred retriever that would tilt its head when Lena cried, like it didn't understand why.

"Heh," Kara chuckles. "Now I don't understand. I know what inversion is, from my Earth classes. What's a deviant?"

"What do you mean, what's a deviant? Something wrong inside me. I...I don't want men. And you," Lena scoffs.

"I think you could probably have any man alive."

"Ah," Kara replies and the sound is like a pop. Lena's spine gives a little shiver, right on cue.

"We don't have those."

"See? You've found some kind of way to fi!-"

"Be quiet," Kara hisses.

Lena does. Lena obeys her as quick as Ignatius would obey Lex for a treat. Obeying feels good. Obeying makes the hot slippery feeling on her thighs spread farther.

"We don't have deviants because we don't think of it that way. Women marry women. Men marry men. We've had female alphas for ages. Some of them real studs like my Aunt. My mother wasn't lying when she teased her. Astra took three lovers on the journey. She sired with two of them. Gorgeous little babies. I'm going to have so many little cousins."

"She's...not female?" Lena asks.

"She is _aos,_ like you and me. My half-sister, Alex, she is a true female Alpha, not an _aos._ "

"I don't know what that word means."

"It means, basically _life_ and it's what we use for nouns that aren't masculine or feminine. LIke 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she' and here it refers to omegas or alphas who... I'll show you. Please don't be scared, all right. I'm going to come closer and I want you to tuck your head in the crook of my neck. Just breathe, all right?"

Kara leans over and she's so big she doesn't need to move the chair and Lena doesn't need to regrow her bones to make contact. Her smell is everything and Kara is petting her head and murmuring to her in her language and then the smell changes. Softens. Has more flowers in it. Like tulips maybe, sour-sweet.

"Think about someone you like. Surely there's some pretty girl," Kara jokes.

_Yes, you. You with your golden skin and your big hard arms keeping me safe. You helping me and the smell of you making me not sick after days of agony._

"About how soft she is. Imagine putting your hands on her hips. Imagine her breasts in your hands. Filling them. Soft. Heavy. Juicy on your tongue. Imagine how hot she is around your fingers when you're inside her."

Lena feels a twist and the soreness between her legs changes. It's not empty anymore. It's like a bruise. It went from being not enough to too much.

"Open your eyes and look down, pretty girl."

Lena does. Something between her legs is pushing the blanket up. Rising. Weeping dampness onto it. She looks over to Kara and finds her licking her goddamned lips which is not exactly helpful.

"It's your _arrosh,_ Lena. Your...I think on Earth they call it a vagina? For _aos_ , for us, it's more like an elephant's trunk, I suppose. Solid muscles. Thousands and thousands of them to make it and very flexible. I pushed my smell towards female. Made myself think how good you would be inside me. How _hard_ you would be and how _full_ it would feel for me."

"And my body just grew a cock? Out of nowhere?" Lena scoffs.

"Say that word again," Kara begs.

"Cock."

"That sound at the end. The hard one."

"Cock," Lena grinds out.

"Mmm," Kara purrs. "Your body felt that I was female phased right now and it wanted me so the parts around the _arrosh_ tensed and they pulled back. The _arrosh_ itself was free and pushed out."

There's a rumble and Lena realizes it's Kara's breathing. Rattling in her throat like a purring cat. A big cat. She's such a big girl, maybe more a lion than anything. Do lions purr? Lena can't recall.

 ** _Our lion does,_** her other mind tells her.

"You would feel so good inside me. It's hard to think about anything else. You could ride me or I could ride you. Fill me up. Put a baby in me, if you wanted. If we wanted... Someday, maybe."

Kara moves her hand over Lena's lap and the thing under there, whatever terrible thing it is, _moves_ and softens and chases her hand just a bit. It leans left and right.

"It wants my skin. It's sensitive to smell. Movement. Heat. If it were inside me or in my throat, _Rao_ I want it in my throat, it would chase warm paces. Places where I trembled."

"It hurts, Kara."

"I know, pretty girl. Strong, brave, pretty girl."

Kara presses a kiss to her forehead and her _arrosh_ jumps, dampening the sheets more.

"Right now all your body wants is a mate. It's making you sick, trying to convince you nothing else matters. I'm here and you like my smell and it's frustrating. So frustrating for me too. I want to help you, I do. Help you feel good. Make you come so the heat would level off. Keep you in my arms until it cooled. Kiss you. Stroke you. Be inside you. Have you inside me."

"We don't know each other, Kara."

Kara hums.

"We can. I want to. Sometimes good friends who are alphas and omegas do that even if they're not together. It's almost impolite..." Kara chuckles. "If an old flame is single and you are too. Not to help them."

"How long does it last?" Lena asks.

"Three days, if you embrace it. More sometimes. But at least three. If you fight it, more than a week sometimes."

"How often? Monthly? Is it like my periods? Before."

_Will I ever have those? If not, that's the first good thing._

"Several times a year, if you're not paired. Not mated. If you're mated and particularly if you have a mark or your share a bed, more often. More often but easier. Once, twice a month. It stops hurting so much. So I hear. Lazier. More like being cold than burning up. Wanting to be near and be held and cuddled and just together for when the mood strikes."

Kara's shoulders soften. Sag.

"I wouldn't know. I've never been with an omega. Only betas. It's less complicated but it's also...hmm. I think you might say it's more like a favorite snack. It's good and you're not hungry but not full, either. Some alphas are paired with betas but I couldn't. I would miss this. Like now. How it feels like it's only air because it smells like you."

"Can you stay close and hold me?" Lena pleads. "While I sleep?"

"I don't think I could sleep if I didn't," Kara says, bringing her gaze to Lena's.

Her eyes are blue and even with her pupils half gone, it's amazing. It's like the storms from when they lived in Cape Cod. The ones that came in and noon became sunset the clouds were so thick. It's dark and deep and there's paler flecks, like the white caps of the waves. Lena lets her eyes close. She wants that storm to be the first thing she sees. She wants to wake up to eyes like an angry sea and with her lungs full of bread and tulips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Invert was an early term used by some lesbian groups like the Daughters of Billitis in the 1950s.


	3. (Love Is Like a) Heat Wave | (Kara & Lena)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where there's a new kid in school and Lena starts to notice things and where superstrength may not be enough to not kiss Lena and where Ruby has two mommies and Sam's bullshit is useful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mon-El here acts like the actor, Chris Wood, who's a sweetheart. Not the character, who is a waste of skin.  
> \-----  
> The first commercially available birth control pill was approved in 1960. When introduced it was widely banned by state law and the first nationwide right to birth control was established in 1965 but only for married women in in the case _Griswold v. Connecticut._
> 
> Alex would not have had access to it in 1959, even if it worked on a half-Kryptonian.  
> \-----  
> Kara is going to have problems getting her head around the deep south in the midst of the Civil Rights movement.  
> \-----  
> Alex is still Kara's bridge to human life. Eliza is one of the Kryptonian's "co-conspirators" among the humans from before the invasion. She was asked by Alura to raise Kara in her home so so Kara would be acclimated to Earth.
> 
> The actor who played Jeremiah is an ass and a bigot so in this verse, Eliza had a fling with Zor-El after a few too many bottles of Aldebaran rum. Kara and Alex are half-sisters from two different mothers.  
> \-----  
> QB1 = Quarterback 1 aka "Starting Quarterback"

**Kara - El Paso, Texas - Sept. 1960**

Three days in, Kara knows that human schools are terrifying. There are no medical facilities, the teachers are a mix of gray-haired and long-suffering saints, panicky unmarried women who seem to disappear every other week and perverts. There is nowhere for an omega to hide or an alpha to relieve the pressure, the security seems mostly to be physically smaller and more shy students who are rolled over by rockheaded brutes so much larger Kara isn't sure they're really the same species.

Despite a loud, healthy, happy community of darker-skinned people on one side of town, the only dark-skinned student is Kelly, Lena's friend and she is subjected to abuse that would make Astra's shock troopers cringe. Kara tried to stick close, buffering the girls back with her bulk and it only half worked. Someone called her something -- it sounded like dyke, like the protective structure in Holland -- and Kelly burst into tears and ran off so fast that the only way to catch her would require using her powers.

There's also some garbage about 'football' and it's talked about, on average, six times as often as classwork. Kara isn't sure this is actually a school like Lena says.

Lena goes here. She must be a good student because her scent hangs in thick drapes in the library and the classrooms and the office. As the small droning male named Winn gave her a tour, she got a sample of Lena's scent before she presented and _Rao's grace_. It was no less glorious. It made her glad she had taken Lena's advice, bound her breasts with ribbon and dressed in boy's clothing because as she is now, wrapped in the scent of both unripe and ripe Lena, knowing them both? Before and after? She's likely to make a puddle in the chair if she were wearing one of these open-bottomed 'skirt' contraptions. With her other lovers, she's been in male phase more often but Lena brings something out in her. Perhaps it's whatever scrap of omega lives in the alpha, the fragmentary and lonely heart that seeks its mirror image. Lena is hurting and tense and riled up and _challenged_ by her peers. Alphas empathize with being challenged, they all know it. Down in the bones. 

Kara's body is reacting to that, wishing she could calm her like she did that sweet, shy, silly Daxamite ambassador. Mon-El needed a bedmate and a listening ear, especially a non-male alpha who would slowly sink a knot into his ass while rubbing his back. It was and unusual on Daxam for being an alpha-beta, let alone a male submitting rather than taking. That affair was easy from shy start to tear-free finish when Kara was rotated to her next semester abroad. Mon-El called on her to be an alpha, just in a new way.

Lena calls on her in a way she doesn't yet know how to meet. If she were an omega like her mother, she would _know_ how to fix it. Know how to calm Lena as much as she knew how to breathe, or walk, or move her hands.

Perhaps she's in female phase because she's trying to grant Lena's stated preference for female bodies. Kara can't comprehend how nice it would be if Lena wanted her. There's no language for that, no mathematics to describe something so all-powerful or perfect.

She doesn't know why she's staying female day after day. She does know that she's picked up on probably a dozen other scents, likely unaware hybrids like Lena. Three of them alphas but none of them are half-blood, most eighth. One female alpha, an exchange student named Andrea has a brighter, crisper scent. Probably a quarter. 

The only other one strong as Lena is Sam and she's full-blooded.

Only one of them likable as a person in conversation,. John Corben looks at Lena like she is food. Morgan Edge narrowly avoided a heat vision castration when Lena took his hand off her ass before Kara could and gave Kara a warning glance. The idea that he could touch a female, any female, without permission, without her _pleading for it_ and laugh as if it was nothing? That made Kara's blood sizzle and she relished in the squeak of pain Morgan gave when Lena squeezed his fingers hard, nearly shattering them in her ill-practiced use of her powers.

She made a point of wandering the school today. There's clearly a population of young people about to present in a human society that treats sex with more distaste than they treat the pesticide slaughtering their birds or the toxic plastics that are gradually neutering the males. Enough that it can't simply be troops intermarrying since the occupation. There's an older teacher with gold-and-silver hair who smells of alpha and the woman across the hall who teaches sewing -- rather than how to program robots -- has his smell on her and she has the diffuse, easy smells of a long-settled omega who's bred often and bred gladly.

Unless this region is an outlier, the presence of two mated, aging adults in a town this size means at least one rotation of advance teams must have spent every off duty moment in their two-century-long stays getting cozy with the locals. Very cozy.

There must be tens of thousands of immature hybrids, if not far more. The rate of _aos_ is unnaturally low. Low enough that it doesn't stand out to humans. They see only male and female. Nothing so unusual that there's a few humans who are randier or tightly paired or more virile or more fertile.

Tonight's report to her aunt is going to cause massive problems. 

_**Lena is not safe! We smell others! Weaklings! Halfbreeds!** _

Kara almost hopes that's her primitive brain and not just the famous House of El ego. Maybe the intense sun nearer the equator makes her body more overcharged and this is how her mind processes that.

The office is a mess, too with a small, badly beaten student sniffling in a chair and wearing the scent of another male. Kara wanted to be friendly so she asked who. Now he is acting like it's a bad thing. Scrubbing his skin with his nails until it's raw.

"Kara Danvers?" the gray-haired woman with the glasses calls out.

"Present!" Kara yelps, startled from her reverie.

She stands up, bashing her head into a framed painting. Everything here is sized for humans, naturally, but they don't seem to go for comfort for everybody, only the average. There are three basketball players Kara's height here.

"Heh," the secretary huffs. "See they fed you well, back home."

Secretary means keeper of secrets in a revered dead language and Kara is starting to think humanity's ruling class have their brains installed backward because not only is education so starved that the building is falling down, this woman is obviously paid less than she should be. 

Even if she were on a covert assignment, not an official one, there should be funds. That woman does not dress like she's being paid as a spy should be.

Kara is led into the office of the principal which has the horns of a dead herbivore mounted on the wall and a paddle in a glass case. It which looks like a cruder, meaner version of something Astra explained to her late one night while sharing liquor she confiscated. That does not look like it was meant to give _good_ pain. It does not look like it was meant to scrape and slap an omega's needy flesh until she loosened up.

"Morning, young man. Now..."

The principal stands up and steps close. Closer than he should but her cover isn't going to work if she shoves him back. he looks her up and down, like he was _measuring her_ rather than what she asked. She came her because she'd wanted help finding her classes in this messy maze of tangled hallways with failing fluorescent lights.

"My my. I don't think we're short a quarterback anymore."

"Sir?"

"Practice is tomorrow night. Five o'clock sharp."

"Sir, I wanted to ask something about my _classes._ "

He looks up at her, blinking in confusion.

"It'll be handled, young man. Nothing to fear there. You'll attend class when you can, of course, but we can't have you being disqualified!" he exclaims.

"If there's nothing else, I have to call some parents."

Dazed, Kara turns and leaves.

_Perhaps the secret-keeper is here to determine why this sports complex is being treated as a school._

There's a knock on the door before Kara reaches it.

"Come in."

It's Lena. Clean, healthy, freed of her heat. Glorious. A growl gets stuck in Kara's throat. It's a sound that belongs in an animal, not a thinking being. Lena's pale skin wrinkles between her eyebrows when she looks up and inspects Kara and _Rao_ does Kara feel unworthy under the hard stare of those blue and green eyes. The stare is unforgiving. Sharp. Like glass from broken bottles.

"I overheard as I reached for the knob, sir. I can help Mi-"

Lena coughs.

" _Mister_ Danvers."

"Thank you, young lady."

She walks over to his desk and sets a neat stack of papers there. Kara's mind passes through a cloud of faint floral scents and that spice they put on the meat. What do they call it? Mesquite. The one that reminds her of something she last ate on Krypton. The one that meant she broke down and finally _ate_ an animal because that spice wasn't on any fruits.

"My homework, sir, from when I was ill."

"Hmm. Typed, even. I'm sure your teachers will be pleased. Just don't let it happen again."

 _ **How dare he?** _Her alpha snarls. _**Lena is perfect! She deserves to be coddled! Cherished in her heats! Every time! Not made to work! She can work when she is cooled! After she has been fed and fucked and held and washed and sang to and made to sleep!**_

Kara nearly wept when Eliza explained that it would be unusual for her to court and make love to females here. She warned Kara that even then, Lena would have to be tested in the temple to make her strong enough for a rut. Because under this bright and brutal star, Kara could break her all too easily.

Surely nothing was crueler. Until her alpha decided to try at being a romantic poet.

Lena's little hand slides into Kara's. It's like touching the stove burner. She did that once when Alex tricked her. Strange, because there's no heat source but it prickles and warms all the same.

"Come on, you big lug. I'll show you around."

* * *

* * *

**Lena- El Paso, Texas - Sept. 1960**

Lena had been aware high school football _existed_. 

It was hard to escape the madness when Lillian moved them here from Boston. She never saw the appeal of being out in the heat, at night, with floodlights so hot and sharp they were like knives in her eyes. 

Yet here she sits in the gathering gloom, book open on her knees with a flashlight illuminating it. She meant to keep one eye on Kara while studying but it's become one eye on the book while studying Kara.

Kara ducking and weaving as men try and hit her and slide off like water on a duck. She's using her speed and her flawless agility to make it _look_ like she's really good at shrugging off a hit but she's never letting them make contact to prevent anyone breaking their neck ramming into her. The coach's whistle dropped from his slack mouth twenty minutes ago. A spider has probably started a web in there at this point.

Blissfully, Kara seems unaware of the godlike status that comes with being a QB1 in Texas. She doesn't know that every girl in school will be jockeying to 'go steady' with the hot new boy. Kara is going to have some explaining to do when an eager girl tries to get a hand in her pants or worse, her shirt.

Lena's teeth grind just thinking about one of those empty-headed little whores on the cheerleading team. Taking Kara to Lover's Lane for some fun and then rejecting her when they find a soft, smooth breast where they want hard, hairy, sweaty maleness and the only thing worse than imagining that is imagining the cheer captain. Lana Lang. Lana might well _enjoy_ learning the local stud is made of the same stuff she is and might even keep the secret. Keep Kara hidden away for her own private entertainment. That is something Lena cannot allow.

Kara knows none of this. She comes from a place where people are in love or not, or simply enjoy each other sexually and there's few of the tangled rules about how many dates and tongue or no tongue and certainly someone being good at that strange game they play on the ship wouldn't give them access to more sexual partners unless they were also _attractive_ so she might as well be a rabbit surrounded by wolves. 

She actually asked Lena if QB1 was a chemical compound, leading to some questions from Lena and a flood of scientific information from Kara's too-puffy, too-pink lips that probably contained wonders humans never were privy to before.

The science was fascinating but the voice speaking it to her was low and rough, like gravel underfoot. That is why she's still moist, almost three hours later.

"Hey Lee!" someone calls out.

Lena turns her eyes just far enough to see Sam waving at her from a few rows down. She has Ruby on her hip and Alex is leaning against her. Droopy and ruined with sweaty hair. Sam steers Alex into a seat and folds a blanket over her lap and moments later, Alex is snoring. Audibly. From twenty feet away.

Alex must have healed enough to have post-baby sex and overdid it apparently re-bruised herself.

Lena and Sam had become friends little by little: runaway and forgotten bastard. One day, she introduced Sam to Alex and was treated to watching two ostensibly smart women sit there stuttering and twitching, unable to make three-syllable words. Failing to find their own mouths with their fries. It was like they were two ends of a shorted-out wire. Sparking when they made contact but utterly useless all the same. Thinking back, she now recognizes as the rush of raw, head-spinning hunger she got on meeting Kara. Three months before they graduated, Alex began showing. Rumors began but it was never obviously pregnant and Alex could have passed it off as extra muscle from track practice. Nothing was ever confirmed. Then they disappeared. Both of them.

Sam came back into her life three weeks ago with a baby with her complexion and Alex's whisky-colored eyes and the only story that would possibly work. It was her baby, she swore. Someone attacked her on the way home from school and she fled across the border, taking refuge in a slum in Jaurez where she was taken against her will and held in captivity. She snuck a note to Alex and Alex called the cops who recovered Sam a few days after the birth.

She swore up and down on bibles and to the judge that her attacker was a white man and even picked a convincingly disgusting local lowlife out of a lineup. No one burned the black part of town to the ground. With the Kryptonian peacekeepers ever watchful, hovering invisible past the clouds, it wouldn't have worked anyway.

The whole lurid tale was ridiculous and stupid and _perfect_ because the church ladies swarmed around Sam like flies, telling her how brave it was to accept God's gift of a child -- which they had been told was a product of _rape_ \-- and said if she accepted God, she could be forgiven for losing her virginity. As if she had made a mistake by being _raped_ and in retrospect, Sam needed to only nod and pretend to cry to fit those old hag's wildest dreams.

They never found Alex's simultaneous disappearance too worrying. Such a brave young woman to keep putting up posters and making calls! To never give up on her friend!

If the praise of "God's gift" and the Cro-Magnon idiocy of the religious preening bothered Sam, it never showed.

With no guardian to stop her, Sam had options that Alex didn't. Eliza was clearly playing along anyway. She acted as if she'd never met the child, meekly signed off for the local hospital and pronounced Ruby a healthy little girl with no one on the birth certificate but Sam. It must have ached to do that. Lena suspects Eliza pulled the babe from Alex herself. There was pressure on Sam from convents and from local childless couples but no one had hard any fast authority over her.

So it came to be that Ruby and her mothers settled back into Texas as if nothing strange had happened and that two women hadn't somehow made a baby.

The fact that Alex maintained the lie for thirty seconds in Sam's presence is a goddamned miracle. Ever time Sam so much as glances sideways at Alex or her lip lifts into a quarter of a smile, Lena expects Alex to dance around and crow that it's her baby because Sam is so amazing and so beautiful and probably end up hauled off to the asylum.

Before tonight, it didn't bother Lena that she's never actually met _Ruby_ properly.

"Sam?" Lena calls out.

Her friend turns.

Lena opens her arms and make a grabby gesture with her fingers.

Sam clambers over the bleachers and lowers Ruby into Lena's hands, showing her how to cup the head with one hand and sway with her. Ruby is tiny and soft and something in Lena twangs like a guitar string when she holds this perfect, fresh life in her arms. More slick pools between her thighs and her eyes dart up to where Kara is shrugging off a linebacker like lint on her shirt.

This new animal in Lena isn't subtle.

"Hi, little lady."

Lena lets Ruby's tiny fingers explore and wrap around one of Lena's and her endless brown eyes stare up at Lena. The hair on her head is so perfect it's like the _idea_ of softness. The concept of softness comes from Ruby's thin, dark hair and everything else is just the watered-down copy.

Ruby burbles and makes herself very busy with Lena's blouse.

Sam snorts.

"They are the _original pair_ Rubes, the archetype from which all other boobs descend. But they're not for you."

"Jerk," Lena grumbles, nudging Sam with her foot.

She can smell it. Sam smells like hot metal and smoke, not unpleasant but sharp and somewhat frightening. Lena has that same urge to bend and agree but it's muted.

Kara explaining that her sister was an _unah_ alpha in a relationship with an _aos_ alpha like herself only cinched it. Sam knocked Alex up. Kara joked about how much 'fun' their first major fight would be, with two minds and bodies programmed down to their innermost core to step up, not back down.

The blunted nature of Sam's scent and affection towards her is natural, according to Alura's nightly chats on that amazing 'tablet' she sent down. They are simply a sign that Lena is recognizing Sam's status as a mated Alpha and her own respect for Alex is telling Lena that she's family. Alura was unwilling to be corrected on this. She thinks the link is through Alexand not her friend Sam which would make _Kara_ the lynchpin as Kara's half-sister. Lena can't go there. Not yet. She finds herself wanting to be more obedient to Sam than she would be to a stranger or Lillian for that matter but it's less obedient then she will be to 'her star' according to Alura. 

Alura always gushes about her own pairing so much that Lena had to drill to find some of Alura's pet peeves about Zor-El to be sure the woman wasn't insane. Beverages abandoned in their shared lab until they congeal and other times, her beverage swiped and emptied and placed in the cleaning system before she was finished. Changing the sheets right after sharing his rut which gets rid of the stickiness but robs her of the scent. Sending Kara away during Alura's heats and his ruts if it will 'scandalize the poor dear' when Alura knows that he knows Kara has had more than a dozen ruts herself since presenting later than usual at sixteen in Earth years.

It sounded like the sort of irritation someone would come up with if they were put on the spot to find flaws in their spouse. Believable, but only barely.

Clearly, they're doomed. Zor-El needs to cancel his life insurance and hire a bodyguard. 

If Sam and Alex and Alura and Zor-El are even remotely typical mated pairs, a life with Kara might...Lena doesn't know. She's not religious and can't imagine Heaven. She not used to more than one happy day in a row. She's never had more than scraps of love. Whatever Lex can give before Lillian catches him. So she can't conceive of it. What do the pieces of love look like? How do you add more to them?

She doesn't have the instructions or the wood or the nails to frame a fantasy of life with Kara.

"She likes you," Sam whispers, shaking Lena from her fog. "Ruby."

That's Lena's new hobby. Drifting off into nowhere trying to process her new reality or just process Kara's presence. 

Sure enough, Ruby is sleeping in Lena's arms.

"What's your plan with Kara?" Sam whispers, leaning closer. "You want her, I can tell."

Kara manages to dodge her scrimmage partner but then slam into the goalpost, making the whole thing twang like a tuning fork. She does have the common decency to act like she just knocked herself out.

"I think she can hear us..." Sam warns, sing-song.

"I'm not sure, Sam. Last week I didn't have any of this. I didn't know I was only half-human, I didn't know there was such a thing as a Kryptonian. I knew as much as anyone else. Which was nothing, apparently. I didn't know things like you and Kara even existed."

"So? You seem to like her. She triggered you which is..."

Sam bows out a long breath.

"That's something Lena. It doesn't tell you if she snores or folds her clothes wrong but it..."

Sam sighs.

"Alex and I are like puzzle pieces. We _fit_. It's so many little things. The triggering felt accidental. But I don't think it's accidental that she can tell when I want her fries and doesn't have to ask. I don't think it's accidental no matter how much she flops down all over me, I sleep well. I don't think it's accidental that I've never smelled or tasted anything better than her. My body makes it easy to be near her. It helps make everything up here..."

Sam taps her temple.

"Easier to deal with."

"It's confusing," Lena whines.

Sam nods towards the cheerleaders doing their own drills at the other end of the field.

"Confusing enough to miss your shot to ride Kara into the sunset? Because I'm nearly positive that Jenny is an omega just too stupid to know there's something up. Lana's either a beta with a mean streak or a female alpha who's just the best actress I've ever met."

Lena glances at the watch Lionel gave her in his will. It's nearly eight. In ten minutes, Kara will be told to go wash the sweat off and head home.

"If you think Jenny isn't sneaking around back to pick the lock on the boy's locker room right this instant, you're not as smart as you think."

Sam leans close to whisper.

"What's it gonna be, buddy? You gonna let someone else break in that mustang or not?"

Lena doesn't remember handing Ruby back to Sam but when she realizes she did, Sam just laughs.

"Go on," Sam jokes. "Shoo."

Now all Lena has to do is figure out a way to fuck Kara that doesn't risk exposing Kara's secrets and does something, please dear God, to calm this knot of tension gathering from her hips to her shoulderblades.

Maybe she should take Lex up on his offer to buy her a car.

There must be some reason people spend hours parked in Lover's Lane...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don't think I'm going to go full "Shakespeare in Love" hijinks with Kara crossdressing, you haven't been paying attention.


	4. My Boyfriend's Back (And You're Gonna be in Trouble!) | Lena

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where there's a bedroom use for a Luthor's evil ways, Lena sets up a plan to sexually frustrate the Blonde Squad into an early grave and Kara plays her part.

**Lena- El Paso, Texas - Sept. 1960**

Lena glides into the boy's locker room like a phantom. Boys turn their heads like wolves scenting raw meat and then their eyes follow hers to the far end, where Kara must be and they slink back.

 ** _Good!_** Lena's instincts roar. **_Ours is stronger! She can do what they never will!_**

If she's being fully honest, this sex maniac in her head is the only thing keeping her upright. Good girls don't go into the boy's locker room, uncaring how the cold spray sticks their hair and their clothes to the skin. How the wet and the chill eans every boy here and see Lena's nipples as they perk up.

Max Lord is in here. Of course he fucking is. His own eyes are glazed and his hand is on his cock but he doesn't seem to know how to move up and down. His first rut, no doubt. Somehow his pheromones ramp her up and nothing more. It doesn't make her want him, it just makes her _want_ in general.

Lena tilts her head -- it feels like she doesn't fully know how to work her body -- and looks at him.

"Kara," she rasps.

"Far end, around the corner. Are you all right?"

 _Max,_ Lena decides, _isn't so bad. He's certainly not Morgan Edge..._

Kara is up against the wall, keeping Jenny fucking Talbot back with one broad hand on her head. She left her compression bindings on and even wrote dates on them, like a doctor making a note. So they look like bandages rather than the only thing, the only wicked thing, keeping her breasts from filling Lena's palms.

Sam wasn't kidding. Jenny is an Omega and she's not exactly doing credit to her kind right now. One hand is between her legs , moving so fast and hard it's like she's trying to pull her clit off and her head keeps jerking towards Kara and making whiny sounds like a stray puppy. Kara is trying -- fruitlessly -- to cover herself with the other hand. Kara's hands are big. They're nowhere near _that big_ and the sight of that cock between Kara's legs makes her core clench but the realization it's only half hard slows the swirl in Lena's brain.

Her plan had been to get in here, suck Kara off and drag her home where she could take the bandages off, beg Kara to shift female and _finally_ get a chance to be between a woman's legs. Truthfully, it still is and her throat feels _thick_ and _too wet_ and breathing is just a tiny bit harder. Saliva is pouring out, creating a pool around her tongue.

 _My throat is lubricating itself,_ Lena realizes.

Her instincts tell her it would feel so _good_ and the fancy part of Lena's brain wants to ask Kara about this. Is the throat a sex organ for omegas? For alphas too? She remembers Kara's groan when she was imagining Lena's _arrosh --_ no, she decides to call it a cock like a good Irishwoman -- filling her throat.

A flash of insight comes to Lena. It's not a lightbulb, though. It's a spurt of blood on newfallen snow. It's mean and it's devious and when she's finished, her enemies will be cowed. It would probably make any of Lillian's criminal cronies proud.

She wants to say something to Kara but she can't without Jenny hearing.

She still has her notepad from the school paper in her back pocket so she whips it out and writes something.

> **Go ahead.**

Lena rips off a sheet and starts over.

> **Fuck her.**
> 
> **Hard.**
> 
> **Fill her mouth.**

Kara groans as the full weight of the idea lands in her mind.

> **Fill her belly.**
> 
> **Fill her cunt.**
> 
> **I'll watch.**
> 
> **I'll learn.**
> 
> **Make her beg.**
> 
> **She'll never taste you again.**

"Jenny," Kara begins.

Nothing. The reply is non-verbal. Nearly non-human.

Kara snaps her fingers sharply.

"Jenny!"

"I've thought about it and if you really want to so bad, you can."

Jenny grins, victorious. Whatever higher functions she has left must think that after a blowjob, Kara will be hers. No boy would dump a girl who puts out on the first date, after all.

Lena never really understood all that self-imposed and self-defeating restraint because if Lena ever found a willing girl, she would probably cling so close her sweetheart would need a crowbar to get her off. She is in a different world now, one foot in the Kryptonian's mindset and their libertine ways. 

Jenny is playing by half the rulebook.

"Go slow," Kara warns her. "Don't hurt yourself."

She cups the side of Jenny's head and pushes gently to the left. Jenny hums happily and bends and Kara's scent swells. This isn't a shower anymore. It's a hurricane. Briny. Cold. Powerful. The ocean rages around Lena, unstoppable and endless. Kara is a storm goddess. Lashing parched desert soil with sheets of hard, wind-driven _wet._

Kara's eyes are on Lena, not Jenny. Her small smile is for Lena. She is chosen. The tempest protects her. She is in the eye. 

Kara's hand lifts off and Jenny's head stays tilted. Like she was clay that had been remolded.

Lena decides to write out some more questions.

> **Unconcious?**

Kara shakes her head.

> **Reflex?**

Another wrong guess.

> **Submission?**

Kara nods.

> **Only during heat?**

Kara shakes her head. Lena is afraid to ask the next question. It's the only thing about fucking Kara that scares her.

> **Is she able to say no?**

Another nod.

> **How?**

Kara mouths the words slowly.

_'you'_

_'are'_

_'strong'_

_'enough'_

_'and'_

_'i'_

_'will'_

_'never'_

_'hurt'_

_'you'_

Kara inhales sharply, so much so Lena's surprised Jenny didn't catch it. Her lips tremble and she sucks in a sniffling breath and looks right at Lena. Stormy blue eyes hold Lena's focus. The roof could have fallen in for all Lena knows.

_'my'_

_'love'_

Lena sniffles. Her lover, her _Kara,_ her _Alpha_ is about to fuck this silly little girl into a boneless mess because Lena asked her too and before she does, she needs Lena to know she's loved. 

She's using her influence to make Jenny little more than a doll. The thin, slimy scent of heat pumping off Jenny like fumes means she'll enjoy it. She wants it. It doesn't make it less scary.

Lena needs more questions. It's just too hot quizzing Kara while she fucks Jenny.

> **Why do that?**

Rather than nod, Kara takes a step back and gently rotates Jenny to face away from Lena, never touching her head. Never breaking the limpness or the mold. Then she pushes Jenny's knees out from under her and catches her. Gravity is nothing to Kara and right, now, nothing to Jenny.

_She's lining her up. Fuck! She's making sure it will fit._

Kara's big hands under Jenny's arms keep her off the floor effortlessly and when Kara takes a step forward, Jenny snaps out of it. She licks her lips.

"Gonna take good care of you, sugar..." she promises.

Lena rolls her eyes and she's amazed they didn't fall out.

"Keep your neck, straight, darlin' and I'll go slow, all right? Breathe as much as you like, pretty girl."

Kara's voice is now wired straight to Lena's clit and _pretty girl_ is a switch attached to a high-voltage line.

She did not need to have mastered the Texas accent. That is not fucking fair. Now Lena is going to spend the next week tossing in bed while she dreams of stout heroes in leather and denim and a tip of the hat and a nod and a _'take care, ma'am'_ and Dream Lena looks up and it's a woman's face, sweaty from the desert heat. If she's lucky a lasso might be involved too and her petticoats will end up in rags. 

A low grunt snaps Lena back. Kara felt -- or maybe even smelled -- when her mind wandered.

Kara is not really hard yet -- amazingly -- so she puts just the tip in. Jenny's tongue slides out, lapping at the underside of the broad, blunt head and gathering the dripping water and the cloudy slick mixed with it.

Ever the gentlewoman, Kara makes sure Jenny leads the dance. Jenny works herself down and Kara switches to a one-handed hold across the collarbone while rubbing her thumb on Jenny's throat. The free hand tangles in Jenny's hair and scratches her scalp, bringing a shiver up from Jenny's belly.

As Jenny gets the head in and seals her lips, the rest of the shaft shivers. Ripples. Almost to swift and too slight a moment to see. If she didn't know it was raw muscle, not a blood-filled sponge, Lena would think it was her mind tricking her.

Jenny feeds herself the first half and switches -- amazingly -- to breathing through her nose, nostrils flaring and air whistling in and snot gathering as she pants. It's unsexy. Rather, it would be except for the way Kara's head has fallen back and the gasping _'oh' 'oh' 'oh'_ sounds she's making.

Lena can see it now, how Jenny's throat bulges. Fattened just under her jaw, that must be the head. It must not hurt because Jenny groans and her outstretched tongue flutters along the slick skin and Kara is groaning and pulling Jenny off. Jenny's naked thighs clench as if she just came. Kara almost drops Jenny in her hurry to aim away. 

Kara moans. 

The first thick _rope_ of white mess arcs up to the ceiling and spatters there in a long white blotch. 

The name that she hoarsely calls over and over like a prayer is _Lena,_ not Jenny. Jenny is curled up, shaking with aftershocks and too deep in her orgasm-baked stupor to realize. 

The next two don't make the ceiling but they make it halfway across the room. Lena is spellbound. Each spurt is accompanied by a shiver from Kara's calves to her shoulders and matches her breathing and it _goes on_ and seems like it might go forever as long as Kara's stroking or as long as Lena's watching. 

Lena had thought she was joking about 'filling her belly' but perhaps not.

The last, faintest spurt is aimed down as Kara's softening cock points at the tiles. 

There's a cracking sound and the mess sits in a little divot in the tile, puddling in the crater.

_Fuck. Good thing I'm half Kryptonian. That would have blown the back of Jenny's head off._

Kara helps bring Jenny to a sitting position and strokes her hair back off her forehead.

"Good girl."

She nods at Lena. Lena doesn't know why but her omega _does_ and it is snarling in her ear. Gleeful. This little whelp isn't worthy of Kara. Isn't who Kara wants.

She struts forward and takes Jenny's blonde tresses up in a tight fist.

"All you get. Kara is _mine._ Loves _me,_ not _you_. I let you have a taste because I'm not like you. Tell anyone we did this to you and I tell your pastor you broke into the boy's locker room and did this. I never want to so much as _see_ you near my locker, understand?"

Jenny nods, shoulders slumping. Then she finally, finally, says something _human_ not just pants and whines and poorly crafted innuendo. Something that involved thought.

"Then...I...I wish I'd been nicer to you," she sniffs. "That was amazing."

Jenny dopily pats Kara's thigh. 

Lena's hand falls into Kara's and Kara's big thumb circles her palm. It burns as bright and powerfully as it did when she was insane with her heat but it's real now.

It's a choice.

Kara presses a kiss to Lena's cheek and she flushes, hot, red, happy against those soft lips.

"Buy you dinner, pretty girl?" she asks, mumbling the words into the skin. "Strong girl. Brave girl. My girl."

Lena nods eagerly, knowing those words can make her pliant and loose as Jenny was just now. This time, Kara will stay.


	5. Rock Around the Clock Tonight | (Lena)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara and Lena spend a night, make some memories and Lena does some medical research and geometry and discovers what being happy tastes like.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did research on human anatomy and average sizes of limbs, joints, bones and other things. I take my sinning seriously!  
> \-----  
> Of course SizeKink!Lena would basically get a ruler, a protractor and break out a copy of Grey's Anatomy. It's why we love her so much!

**Lena - Sept. 1960 - El Paso, Texas**

Lena is wrapped in cotton and warmth. 

She's also fairly covered in _skin_ with her Alpha behind her, curling close. She swept Lena's hair forward with one big hand before settling in and it means that every single _inch_ of Lena's skin is touched. Kara's a giantess and Lena is decidedly not, so her whole back is scraped by ladders of hard muscles and her shoulderblades sink easily back into breasts that she hasn't gotten a chance to _see_ yet because she was too hurried to get to bed. The wide dents in her skin from the pressure of Kara's stiff nipples give her one tantalizing clue. Her legs are curled forward and Kara's iron-hard thighs lift Lena's own. Cleverly, Kara arranged them so that they could feel each other all night. None of Lena's slick is going to flow anywhere but Kara's skin and not so much of a twitch of Kara's cock is going to escape Lena's notice. Several times in the night Kara's cock has softened and risen again, tracing a rhythm of lying soft and silken against the back of her thighs and then stiffening and fattening and tracing a line down her leg until it stops ticklishly against the tender back of Lena's knee. Sometimes Kara moves or whines, puppy like, like she's playing in a dream and tthat brings a spurt of sticky wetness from the tip and it splashes, startling and sudden on the skin.

It's terrifying and it's not. Kara would obviously never hurt her knowingly but just the geometry of it is jarring to Lena. That all has to go _somewhere_ and neither her own pride nor her Luthor upbringing allow half-measures. If Kara's cock is going in her, anywhere in her, she's taking it to the hilt and with enough ease they both enjoy it. She wants to spend whole lazy afternoons stuffed with it, Kara's pulse mapped in throbs that carry into her walls and jostler her own heart. Fingers tangled, hair sticky, heels digging into the sheets. Riding. Slowly. Kara's hands palming her breasts when she picks up speed so the bounce isn't painful. She also has a wicked idea about starting with Kara shifted female, perhaps drinking Kara's taste from the source, perhaps grinding their cunts together and then asking Kara to shift male fast as she can manage and going from the molten ease of wet and soft to being speared and ruined in one instant.

That one might take practice on self-control, for both of them. Lena thinks that could be a lovely Christmas gift from Kara.

So she has counted inches with her hands and compared them to her own body, counting from Kara's root and starting her count at her own inner lips. She spread her own fingers hard between her legs, checking the width of the pelvic bones that frame her cunt and bracketed Kara's base where it's thickest with those same fingers. So far, so good. She prodded her own guts through her skin, recalling from class which was which. It can fit and unless something tears through the thick muscle both making up the _arrosh_ and the outer column of even thicker sinew holding that weird, magical organ inside Lena's body -- an injury beyond unlikely with such an attentive lover -- it all has somewhere to go. Somewhere it belongs.

So the 'if' is handled and she just has to find out how.

The animal in Lena -- that's how she's chosen to think of it -- sees a challenge in that. Her mind flashes through positions, cues, noises, scents, glances. Knowledge that was burned into her bones that she never knew before. Reflexes like the ones that a baby uses to seek nipples. 

Her animal prefers the approach which leads to Kara pushing her into the sheets, spreading Lena's legs with a slap to the thigh and impaling her. There's a dance to it, as snarling and animalistic as the image in her head remains.

Make Kara kiss her during her heat, in public when there's no privacy.

Hook her hip around Kara's as they sit together with their friends, in the same way she would to draw her cock deeper when they were alone. Watching that tasty, candy-cane red blush climb Kara's cheeks. Sam and Alex would be best because they could smell it. They would know the game that was being played.

Make a show of ogling other alphas.

Let other alphas or just other boys at school get too close and then rejecting while billowing her scent, emptying their brains into their dicks and luring Kara to her rescue.

Whine.

Take to her knees and bend over at the flimsiest excuse. Dropped pencil. Lucky penny on the sidewalk. Anything. 

Flood the room with scent as she comes out of the shower and takes her sweet time looking for a towel.

Her _body_ knows how to prod and provoke an Alpha and it takes little effort for her mind to translate those tactics from jungle to math class. Lena suspects she just has to try them and note which ones her _mind_ enjoys most. Which one make her get slick enough to glide in without friction which get Kara crazed enough for her to simply shove it in and let the stretch and the grip steal the breath from both of them.

For sleep, they laid down in her favorite position and Kara nuzzled forward into her hair and put an arm around her waist and curled and Kara was gone. Slipped under almost before she was done laying Lena's hair over her back. Now she's sleeping how _Kara_ prefers and if it's the price for the idle nuzzling of the cheek on her neck or the happy hums of whatever those dreams are about, it's her favorite now too.

She's been unable to slip under, unable to sleep and somehow, it doesn't bother her. Her head is fuzzier but her eyes don't ache like they should as she skims over the books sent to her by Alura.

It's like Sam said about Alex. Her body eases when Kara's near.

She closes her eyes, pushes the tablet away and tries to remember the night she had. The almost-date with the girl she doesn't know anything about except that _this girl_ is _the girl_ and that no life with Kara could be wasted because she's learned enough to know Kara is noble and protective and yes, indulgent of Lena's whims even if they are hardly noble. Willing to use her body and Lena's anger as a weapon to wind up and deprive Lena's competition. 

If she gets pregnant too early? It means Kara worshipping her fattening body and probably means unspeakable new depths wide-eyed fascination with Lena's tits. She and Kara can bring life into the world, it means a thudding little heartbeat held between them in bed. Kissing over the top of the baby's head and 'good night' and laughing too soft so as not to wake the child. It means a child racing around their backyard, cackling as 'daddy' chases it and it means Kara shedding her that at the door and pressing a kiss behind Lena's ear and asking how the little scamp did today and if it was treating its mama well. It means being what June Cleaver only pretends to be.

If word gets out? It means being the town slut, an object of ridicule and disgust. Good. Disgusting things stay hidden and hidden things can nest in Kara-smelling sheets and have breakfast brought too them and whatever insults are hurled her way can be purged, sucked out and squeezed out and licked off her skin. Nothing bad could ever happen. After all, a goddess is murmuring sleep-stupid nonsense into her hair. Being ashamed of Lena but being unable to hurt her and punish her pop a blood vessel in Lillian's brain and she puts that in the plus column. It means that 'little whore' is getting better treatment and has fewer cares than the goddamned Queen of England.

If it means a life together, wondering when they should get a dog, arguing about whether they should have kids and when and how many and everything being their choice?

Lena claps her pillow over her face and wipes tears into it.

It wasn't a date. It was Lena's gray hairs being brushed off her wrinkled head and the last kiss and the last breath. It was their first time on Lover's Lane and the first time in their own home and the first time as wives and every time in between. Time unhooked and the only certainty was the company. The walk along the lake's edge was promise and perspective and eternity. Eternity tasted like lips and tongues and clacking, clumsy teeth sticky from Coke she stole from a delivery truck. 

Turns out nowhere that sells food was open, not even the Dairy Queen. Unwilling to give up the shiver in her limbs and the salt-sweet anticipation Kara's scent brought to her tongue, Lena asked her to come over, thoroughly scandalized that her summers on Earth never included a sleepover -- not that Lena's had one either -- and started to think about how to sneak her in.

She expected Kara to say no, she couldn't or that Eliza wouldn't let her. Kara found a payphone, called Eliza, explained the plan, told her foster mother she loved her and asked her to kiss Ruby for her.

Then turned back to Lena, all smiles. Acted like she hadn't just told her mother she was going home with Lena to 'take care of her' and there was no euphemism to it because Eliza must have made her promise to be safe and go slow and makes sure Lena liked it. Kara put one arm around Lena and bracketed her against the brick of the gas station with the other. Trapped her. Kara is one of those "boys" they warn girls about. 

She cupped her hand behind Lena's head and jogged her hips forward just three times, leaving Lena spinning and blank. Brick dust drifted to the ground, Kara slammed forward so hard. Lena spent the whole walk back staring at her nails in wonderment, seeing where she'd scraped brick into them.

Kara is her alpha and she is Kara's omega and after presenting, she is rediscovering the strength of her heritage. A gift from her birth mother so that she has the strength to match Kara thrust for thrust.

Turns out the answer to sneaking her in was giving her the address. 

Lena parted with a kiss at the top of the block and walked in the front gate of Luthor manor after a long, deliberate huff of Lillian's over the gate intercom. Deciding whether she could have somewhere to sleep. One of the daily rituals to make Lena feel rejected.

She walked into the house and Kara was waiting in the downstairs hallway with one of the guard dogs on her lap, leg kicking as she scratched its belly. Perhaps the wolf metaphor of Alpha and Beta and Omega isn't fully metaphorical, at least to animals.

Lena cackled at that and Kara grabbed the dog when it woke up startled and snarling. After all, the beast's job is to hurt humans and like his namesake, Inquisitor is good at it.

She told the beast 'no' and in one curt huff of command, it slunk down the hall so low it practically dragged.

Lena snatched her hand and led Kara to her bedroom.

For a girl raised on a glittering spaceship and if her aunt is any indication, an important rich girl, Kara seemed amazed. Not only curious. Not only wondering about humans. She liked learning about _Lena's_ bedroom in particular. Stretched out on the floor. Went on tiptoes standing next to the closet so she could run a finger along the oak trim.

Lena guided her stumbling, massive Kara through the easiest of easy waltzes, narrowly missing her feet over and over and keeping a hand on Kara's thigh. It flexed and jumped as they moved and it was like riding a horse bareback, like she would back in Boston when Lillian wasn't watching to enforce sidesaddle.

Caged energy and power danced under her palm.

Finally Lena just laughed, jumping up so she could reach Kara's lips.

It didn't work like she'd planned. Gravity was supposed to keep the kiss sweet, easy, simple. Kara didn't let that happen. She clamped a hand around Lena's back and _kept her_ and just goddamn _explored._ Discovered how long Lena could have her lips kissed before she needed to break for oxygen. Knocked her chin against Lena's when she came up for air to tilt her head back so that Kara could pass the time sucking on her pulse. Mapped out every bit of Lena's lips. Discovered a tiny spot at the edge of the mouth that makes Lena shiver and open and then Kara was inside her and _fuck_. Kara's tongue was wet and hot and crazed, flicking and tickling everywhere without purpose or pattern and in one case, tickling. Lena laughed and bit down partway. She tasted hot copper and moaned. Despite the pain she must have felt -- sweet god, maybe _because_ of it -- Kara moaned into her throat and her arm coiled tighter, like a python with its prey.

Lena's tongue found the roof of Kara's mouth and smeared the blood there, returning it. Kara shivered and let Lena go. Panting. Pupils blown and lips fairly dripping with their efforts. Fingers twitching. Eyes flicking from Lena's face to the door like she expected her to bolt. Expected to have to lunge for her prey.

Her alpha was fighting her inner animal then and Lena's was singing because this goddess had been ruined by her. Made insane by _her_ lips.

Lena had a view of the clock and even as her brain stuttered and failed and _waited_ and only really worked when something new happened, some new pleasure returned her to the world so she could memorize it. 

She caught flashes. Committed them to memory.

9:11

9:53

10:07

10:23

10:53

11:32

12:11

Dawn is climbing the ivy of the east-facing wall and soon will find Lena's window. It's Saturday and she has the books she needs. Alura gave her everything from human works like _Kama Sutra_ to specifically omega-leaning texts both luridly fictional and crisply explanatory. She also provided a list of mailing addresses and obliquely named businesses in the area, which piqued curiosity. 

Kara will surely be a good study partner. 

\-----


	6. She's A Rainbow | Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is going to be a trail of smut and madness that cuts a path of ruin and woe across Texas and Mexico so I'm going to break it into multiple parts as I post it. When it's finished, I'll merge.  
> \-----  
> This is Jenny's redemption arc, if you will. She may not be worthy fo Lena but she's not a bad person and an omega who doesn't know she's an omega can get hurt badly in this mean old world so she needs someone to take care of her. She's going to learn the difference between Argentina and Mexico, the best way to eat a girl out, how to advance racial justice and how to make a mean breakfast in bed.  
> \-----  
> I don't think calling them "Kryptonite" makes sense especially since in the comics, that's the debris from Krypton and Krypton is intact here. So the standard green/red/blue/gold/silver/etc. are all variants of Harun-El that have been used medicinally over the ages. Metallic is a stand in for Platinum Kryptonite (platinum is a human name for an element on the periodic table whereas gold and silver are also words for a color) which is able to give humans Kryptonian powers on a permanent basis.

**Jenny Talbot - Sept. 1960 - El Paso, Texas**

This shouldn't be so fun, but it _is_ fun.

Lena must have changed her mind and dumped Kara because he walked up while Jenny was sunbathing out back and threw Jenny onto a mattress in the bed of a truck and sped off. Now she Is pressed into the bathroom tile of a cheap motel room just over the border. She has a wild _animal_ at her back, and she's stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. The zipper's pull tab scratches at her thighs. Kara didn't even bother to shuck off the jeans. He just unzipped and took Jenny's ear in his teeth and snapped forward, driving all the air out as the cock drove in.

Kneeling above her is another blonde hunk, maybe a friend? Shorter hair, red and cut choppy, and a series of bright crimson tattoos. Little interlocked triangles that go up the neck to the scalp in a thin line and all the way down too, past where her nose is squeezed almost painfully into dark blonde curls. She hasn't gotten either of their shirts off, but she will. She'll scrape those tattoos off with her teeth, goddamnit.

She shouldn't be giving them a double feature, but they're giving more than that, so she'll play along.

Kara speeds up, pressing the bones of Jenny's hips down into the tile over and over. She could swear she hears the click click click sound of it. She'd be screaming her throat sore if it wasn't stuffed with this perfect, salty-sour cock.

The one behind her lunges forward, so far it makes her hiccup, and the one in front of her slides back just enough that she doesn't break her nose and then pushes back into her throat.

It feels good. She'd been sweaty, nauseous, cramping like her period times a thousand. Gave herself a hand cramp trying to get rid of the horniness. Now she's loose and happy and floppy, and she never wants it to stop.

It does. Kara slams home so fast the slap echoes around the bathroom tile and nestles against her bottom before hot jizz pumps into her. The one in front of her grunts, spilling in her mouth.

They high five ech other. It would if the if they hadn't just given her five more of those little hot things. The little flashes behind the eyes that go all over her body. Like she got sucking Kara off in the shower. She's not sure what they're called but they're her new hobby.

"Good girl," they say in unison, rolling her over and rubbing her boobs, her belly, her sides. They're forcing her to stop thrashing and start breathing.

"Fuuuuuuuck," Jenny groans, rubbing her stomach. There's two bumps, one below her ribs and one just above her hips. Like she'd swallowed an apple whole and had another shoved up her pussy.

The one with red tats scoops her up, throwing Jenny over his shoulder and laughing.

They carry her into the motel room and toss her on the bed, making her giggle.

"Mmm," Jenny purrs. "Come back soon, handsome."

Tats tosses a salute. 

"All yours, _senorita_!"

Tats turns to Kara.

"Let's go see if Lena wants dinner yet."

Tats was speaking to someone in the corner.

Lifting her head over the body of a sweaty, snoring negro girl, Jenny sees them. A long-legged, well dressed Mexcian woman in a bathrobe who is finishing up her toenail polish. She smells _good_ and Jenny's never felt this way about a girl before. She smells like spice and wildflowers and butter and honey. The wooziness that had been fucked out of her starts to come back. This time, the scent she wants isn't rainstorms and salt, it's honey and pepper, and with each lungful, she's more and more sure where she can get more: Between that woman's legs. 

"Evening, _querida_. My name is Andrea Rojas. I'm so glad my friends found you for me."

"S'nice to meet you. M'Jenny..."

Jenny holds out her hand to shake but she doesn't have the brains to do it just yet so she ends up shaking hands with the bedspread when her arm flops down.

* * *

**TWELVE HOURS EARLIER**

* * *

**Lena Luthor - Sept. 1960 - El Paso, Texas**

Lena opens her eyes to an empty pillow with a tray of oatmeal, bananas, and orange juice on it. She can feel the weight of someone else on the bed, and she looks around. Kara is sitting on her bed, still naked, thank God. She's shifted female, and somehow one change makes her look totally different. It's not the absence of the cock or even the glistening, puffy cunt that replaced it. The smile she gives Lena seems slower, softer, and it doesn't just touch her eyes. It lives there. She chews her lip more often. Her skin is shinier like it's dusted with something sparkly. Her hair seems bouncier. Either there's other physical changes or Lena is just so stupidly in love that she imagines it.

She's sliding her fingers along the tablet with one hand and tracing curlicues on Lena's belly with another. There's a metal box on the bed next to her. It's silver, with a circular lock in gold or some other shiny metal. Blue and red ribbons are pooled next to it in a puddle of satin.

"Morning," Lena mumbles, her voice scratchy.

"Afternoon, actually. You needed the sleep, _zhao."_

" _Zhao_?"

"Love."

Lena takes a huge bite of toast so that her mouth is too full to ask Kara to marry her. She's going to run out of toast sooner or later.

\-----

She ran out of toast.

"Kara, do you think...um...I haven't really...ugh...I don't even know what it's called. Could we, uh, I think it's called going steady?"

"Stop," Kara chuckles, "Please."

She takes Lena's hand and pets it like she was soothing a kitten.

"These," she says, tapping the box. "Are part of a ritual we use to welcome royal-born Kryptonians home. They will also speed up your body's reaction to _istrun_. Give you the rest of your powers. As the heiress to Vex, you need to go through what we call Testing to take your place. Which is a really fancy way of saying that we're going to pray, I'm going to hold you, and I'm going to give you something to unlock the rest of your Kryptonian tissues."

"I'm a princess?"

Kara rolls her eyes.

"Yes. Vex is the smallest of the great houses. Mostly Shadow Guild, but they've had incredible scientists too. Isn't your mother the second-richest person in the country?"

Lena gulps some orange juice rather than replying.

"What's testing?"

"There's a mineral on our home planet. Harun-El, we call it. The unrefined form is dark gray. The refined form is jet black. There are a few exotic forms that occur naturally. Red. Silver. Gold. Metallic, but that's extremely rare. We've learned to synthesize it since. We use it to manage and improve our bodies since, in places like Earth..."

Kara sighs.

"If I was having a baby and needed an operation, we can't even break the skin without a scalpel with the green form on it."

"So, what's in the box?"

"Metallic. Two doses. It's rare, insanely expensive, and when you ingest it along with black and red, it pumps your body up. The metallic is dust, mixed with a base of black dust and three kernels of green, which will soften your body up, help it absorb. Five percent red, which sort of...hmm."

Kara pauses.

"It's like a stimulant. Too much makes you angry but in this amount, more like speeds you up, makes your circulation faster. Silver, too. One percent. It's a psychedelic. Sometimes people have nightmares on it, but most have a hallucination where they confront something that scares them."

"Like a spirit quest?" Lena asks. "Some of the native tribes do that."

Kara shrugs.

"I suppose. I try not to over-think it because Earth cultures are unique from mine, and they're all valuable."

Lena tilts her head back to finish the orange juice, and Kara cups her hand under her chin in case she spills any.

"Thanks."

"Alphas take care of our Omegas and their young. Always. It's our most important role."

Lena scoffs.

"So what, I stay home and pop out kids, and you go to work? If you were a man, I'd slap you for that."

"Sorry, I'm not, then. Bet that'd be hot. But no, not like that. Actually, most Omegas where I'm from have careers. Sometimes they work from home, like my mom, so that when they're starting heat, they don't have to try to make it home while feeling sick. My mother is our foremost surgeon, Lena. She invented an important diagnostic for swollen pheromone glands while I was breastfeeding. Apparently, my teeth were and inspiration. She tells that story every _Vhoc_ -fucked year. She has invented lifesaving surgeries naked, slick, and sticky Lena, probably because my father's rut knocked the last piece of the idea loose. I once came home and found her half-covered in a towel because she had this great idea. _Rao,_ that was embarrassing. The beta I brought home never looked me in the eye again. I wish it had killed my rut."

**_Ruts! Ruts are mine! Kara! Kara inside! Kara all over!_ **

"Still sounds like being a baby machine," Lena complains. "And that doesn't happen on Earth. Once a woman has a baby, that's all she's good for."

"It will. There's a reason we conquered you," Kara teases.

Lena leaps forward and slaps Kara's exposed nipple. Kara yelps in surprise but recovers quickly enough to grasp Lena's hand and pin it there.

"Your hands are so soft, Lee."

_That did not go as planned._

Lena gulps.

"What do I need to do?"

Kara pats her thigh.

"Come sit on my lap. I'll hold you, so you don't fall, and I'll give you the capsule, and if you like, I'll rub you off while it absorbs."

"Yes, _please_."

Lena scrambles to get into Kara's lap, and _fuck,_ this feels good to have her thighs clamped around Kara's abs and her heels digging into the clenched muscles of her lower back. Kara let go of her hand, but Lena didn't let go of Kara's breast. The nipple has stiffened, pressing into her palm and begging for more friction, _for something_ to happen.

"Why two does, do I need to take one tomorrow?"

Kara picks up one of the ribbons.

"Lena, would you marry me?"

"That's not an answer."

"That's not a no," Kara jokes back.

_Of course, it fucking isn't a no!_

Lena's very proud she isn't elbow deep in Kara's cunt already, pulling this hard nipple with her teeth and sucking marks into her so that everyone, always, forever knows who Kara is with.

"There's a second dose because if I ask for your hand in marriage, I'm supposed to take one with you, just in case. So that I can always care for you," Kara explains, cupping Lena's cheek in one of those big, stupid, warm, catcher's mitt hands of hers that make her whole head feel safe and make it so hard for Lena to sit upright or have bones.

"My Lena, my love, my Omega. My everything."

Lena decides that when someone asks, she is going to blame those blue eyes. Those wrath-of-the-oceans blue eyes that twinkle like diamonds when she smiles at Lena.

"The ribbons?"

"We tie hands together. Blue and red are the colors of my house. House of Ell. Colors fo Vex too, actually. We tie hands as humans do. If we exchange jewelry, it's bracelets, not rings."

"European peasants did that. Like Ireland, where..."

Lena stalls. Kara taps her nose.

"Your mom chose Ireland for her outpost, Lena. You still get to claim it."

"I want you, Kara. I'll marry you. I want to spend as much time as we have, every day, from now until the wedding, getting to know you. Everything about you, no matter how silly or stupid or whatever."

Kara nudges her nose against a soft spot behind Lena's ear.

"Did you read about biting?" she asks. "In Alura's books?"

Lena swallows.

"Something about a bundle of nerves, back of the neck?"

Kara hums.

"When you ask, I'll bite you here..."

Her tongue lashes against Lena's jugular, just behind the jaw.

"I'll taste everything. When my mouth touches your blood, the nerves along your spine will change. These ones here," Kara explains, pinching one of the knobs of Lena's spine ever so gently. It feels larger than the others, even though they all grew when she presented. She probably needs harder bones for when Kara _really_ fucks her. Lena noticed that the ones between the skull and the middle of her shoulders grew the most.

Lena has to swallow to wet her-now dry mouth. Biology isn't usually something that makes her heart speed up like it wants to escape her ribs and go for a jog around the block.

"What's that mean, Kara?"

"The cells exchanged will be drawn into this," Kara taps the knob. "And kept alive there, inside your body. Your nerves there will grow into my cells and then grow more up your spine into your brain so your body can always feel mine. Feel if I'm scared or happy or tired or..."

"Horny?" Lena jokes.

"Yes."

"And when you bite me," she adds, tapping a spot where her collarbone meets her shoulder, "The same will happen."

"Why there?"

"Tradition. Alphas just usually wear our mark-scars here, where they're more obvious. Omegas typically wear them where they can be concealed at all times if they want. The change in your scent when you're mated will keep other alphas from being too stupid but omegas are precious. Mated omegas are not branded cattle, they're sacred. Part of Rao's covenant with my people. My scar should be visible to prevents any sexy little black-haired omegas from getting too forward," she teases.

Lena nods.

"I can just...whenever?"

Kara tilts her head.

"Now, if you want."

"Could we..." Lena sniffs. "I'm scared. So much, so fast. I'd feel better if we took the doses, together, first. Then tie our hands when I come too, then bite. I would feel...protected, I suppose."

Kara opens the box, spills both capsules out into the small stone bowl, and rummages in her bookbag for something. She comes back with a little canister. It's made of etched with circular patterns.

"Hmm. Closest I've got. Some waste circuitry I found doing my first deep space training. Thin. Like rice paper, so we can bite through it."

"It's beautiful. Do it."

Kara unscrews the canister and tips the dust into it, shaking it several times to make sure everything settles evenly. Lena puts her hand on the back of Kara's head.

"Put it in your teeth, hold it for me."

"Like this?" Kara mumbles sloppily around the canister.

_Stupid, silly alpha of mine. Don't talk with your mouth full._

Lena leans forward, seals her lips around Karas, and bites. Hard.

She arches into Kara as lights pop behind her eyes like blown fuses. 

\-----

Lena's vision is fuzzy, and her ears are stuffed with loud, clattering, broken-glass tangles of sound. Cars and breaking glass and sizzling food and screaming children and screaming women and dying animals. Cold sweat paints her skin. She's safe. She knows she's safe because even with her other four senses utterly fucked and her ears stuffed with loud _hurt_ and her vision filled with a million colors that don't actually exist and just too much goddamn light. She can smell Kara. Storms. Storms and salt. That smell will always make her feel safe.

There's a conversation happening around her. Some of it probably on phones because there are more voices than there are shadows. When someone starts speaking, it takes a minute before she can focus on that one sound.

"-uthor really did a number on the roof."

"-ourse she did, Winn. That's what happens when heat vision, orgasm, metallic Harun-el overdose and multidimensional energy spikes mix."

"-able now. Let her wake on her own time."

"-anks, Eliza."

"-ite her already, huh sis?"

"-lex, I'm sure Lena wanted it too."

"-nyone else worried about Kara swallowing the Lantern tech? Splitting into four pieces?"

"-orry. I didn't want it to choke Lena. Her throat's smaller. So pretty..."

If she didn't recognize the voice, the fingertips tracing her pulse would indicate who that was.

"-ore worried about the other...Karas, Kara."

"-ucky we're not dead."

"-ctually I think Lena saved us."

"-obably because a Red Lantern created during a mate bite is more mate than it is Red Lantern. The being it's attached to is a moment in time where everything was perfect because Lena was happy. Long as it's omega's happy, it's happy."

"-ink they have my memories? Or are they different."

"-ack one seemed more interested in Lena's hair than murder. Usually, newborn Black Lanterns sterilize a planet or two for a practice. This one didn't even raise it's voice to Lena. So yes, they have your memories, sis."

"-urder is bad. Winn likes not being murdered."

"-alking about yourself in the third person again, champ."

"-ive it time, murder can still happen. My sister can be pretty annoying."

"-ing to be in for a show when the Violet one comes back. Not enough longstem roses in the world to keep her tongue out of Lena's slit for long."

"-am! Gross! That's my sister."

"-ice tats, Kara."

"-ways knew you embodied Hope, my daughter. Keep your love close. Your omega just saved the universe."

Lena raises her rubbery arms.

"Want. Want to be held," she demands, flexing her fingers greedily. "Please, Kara."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the "spectrum" that powers things like Lantern Rings:
> 
> Blue = Hope (this is the original Kara)  
> Red = Rage  
> Violet = Love  
> Black = Death  
> I wanted to use the bisexual flag colors plus black because Lena Luthor is going to be Goth before Goth was cool.


	7. She's A Rainbow | Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is going to be a trail of smut and madness that cuts a path of ruin and woe across Texas and Mexico so I'm going to break it into multiple parts as I post it. When it's finished, I'll merge.  
> \-----  
> This is Jenny's redemption arc, if you will. She may not be worthy fo Lena but she's not a bad person and an omega who doesn't know she's an omega can get hurt badly in this mean old world so she needs someone to take care of her. She's going to learn the difference between Argentina and Mexico, the best way to eat a girl out, how to advance racial justice and how to make a mean breakfast in bed.  
> \-----  
> I don't think calling them "Kryptonite" makes sense especially since in the comics, that's the debris from Krypton and Krypton is intact here. So the standard green/red/blue/gold/silver/etc. are all variants of Harun-El that have been used medicinally over the ages. Metallic is a stand in for Platinum Kryptonite (platinum is a human name for an element on the periodic table whereas gold and silver are also words for a color) which is able to give humans Kryptonian powers on a permanent basis.

**Lena - Sept 1960 - El Paso, Texas**

"So this is weird."

"Yes, Kara. It is. There are four of you."

"I thought you'd be pleased," the black-haired one with the ash-colored eyeshadow teases. "There's so much more of us now and we can just sort of wrap around you. Our _omega._ The safest creature in all the universes."

It's the redhead who decides to break her goddamned brain.

"One for each hole, Lena mine, and a spare to kiss you."

Lena's eyes flit to the original, who is being very unhelpful right now. Kara's curiosity took over and she's meticulously counting the triangles in her tattoo which would be one thing if her tattoo didn't run up both her legs, the skin of her mound, coil around her torso and spread across her shoulders to her fingers. As if it tracked her blood or her life as it beat under her veins. There must be thousands of individual marks. Lena doesn't have that kind of time.

The others have black, violet, and red tattoos in the same pattern and each has hair to match. 

Red has been poking her ears, looking in the mirror.

_Piercings, maybe? She might like that?_

Black is digging a fingernail nail in her flesh in a complicated spiral pattern.

_Decorative scarification, maybe?_

Violet is fluffing her hair, regarding it as if to decide whether to chop it off.

_Fuck. I'm already trying to decide how to decorate them._

"I'm..."

Lena gulps.

"I'm not sure what I am."

She has ideas, to be sure. Drowning in stroking hands while one woman drinks her in. A mouth on each tit and a cunt for both her hands. Kara holding her while her alter egos take her in turns, quizzing Lena for details about how each one touches her differently while her brain cooks from the heat.

The daydreams aren't the problem. Reality is. This morning, she had one distinctive, head-turning alien goddess in her bed and now she has four, each of which will need housing, a fake name, somewhere to go to school, clothes...

Kara and Violet clearly love her, if Violet is so over the top as to turn up Juliet's nose as too eager. In fact, Violet's tattoos flare with purple fire if she's denied too long. A shower of lazy kisses has been keeping her distracted even if Lena's left arm is about to prune from all the damp attention and each languid press of those sinfully tender lips and lash of the tongue kills another few brain cells.

 _Time for an experiment_ , Lena decides. _Only way._

"What number am I thinking about?"

"Ninety-three," they say in crisp unison.

"Let's see if you can go six out of ten?"

It's not that they're reading her mind, they're getting it wrong more than right. It's that when speaking to Lena, they line up like ducklings.

Lena asks them to say what they love most about her. This time, gratefully, she gets different answers. 

Violet just answers 'your smile' and goddamn if ten years of Lillian's abuse didn't dissolve in the shy way she said it and the fact that Lena had to lift her chin to make eye contact.

Black said it was Lena's coldness. When she saw Lena's frown, she elaborated. Her coolness. Her unwillingness to flinch or scream when mistreated. Compared to planet-slaughtering indifference, she'll take it.

Red answers that it's her enthusiasm. Her zeal to enforce proper behavior on those beneath Lena. Probably everybody, in Red's view but at least it isn't the torture-fiend reputation of the Red Lanterns. 

She inhaled Astra's files as quick as she could but Blues like the original Kara seem so saccharine that there's nothing on them. Violets are talked about like faeries, to silly and sweet to possibly exist. Both are the opposite of a military threat, despite their immense power. The Kryptonian Imperial Gaurd's handbook on Reds amounts to "throw someone at it and run" and for Blacks its "make sure you send a distress call before you die" so that's not instructive here.

Lena sighs.

"Tomorrow, we have to find a place to put you all. Schools, clothing, housing, names, paper trails. Eliza might host you for a day or two but we need more. Tonight..."

Lena looks at the tangle of her bed.

"Violet, please bring the blankets here to the floor."

"Tonight I need to sleep. In the morning, we'll see what comes next."

They curl around her like snakes in spring, legs and hands and _everything_ twined around the precious, desired female in the middle. Each steals a kiss, slow and lazy, before tucking in.

Five minutes in, Lena shucks the blanket off before she boils and she doesn't regret asking for this. She turns to face Kara, winds Violet's hand around her breast, and presses a kiss to Red's hand before putting it over her womb. For walking nightmares, they're more than happy to wait. Black curls up like a kitten in the corner.

They all smell like storms. Hurricanes and dust storms and rains in a flower garden and roaring, half-frozen darts of a stinging October downpour.

Her omega knows what this means and Lena's coming to trust her animal's judgment. They're all Kara. They're all hers. They're not going to hurt her or each other. 

* * *

**Federal Bureau of Investigation - Sept. 1960 - Washington, DC**

"Director Hoover? My name is Lillian Luthor. I hear you want some help with the alien threat."

"Mmph. Why should you be able to help?"

She sets the bag down on his desk and opens it. Emerald light pours out in the dark office.

"Because I have the silver bullet to kill your monster. Deal me in, and you get half of that. My next shipment is in two weeks."

He grunts.

"Why only half?"

"I need a dose for my personal use. One of my children is sorely lacking in discipline..."

He harrumphs and pulls out a fat manila envelope. Lillian peeks inside. Hundred dollar bills.

"Hundred thousand. Let me know if you need more."


	8. She's A Rainbow | Part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is going to be a trail of smut and madness that cuts a path of ruin and woe across Texas and Mexico so I'm going to break it into multiple parts as I post it. When it's finished, I'll merge.  
> \-----  
> This is Jenny's redemption arc, if you will. She may not be worthy fo Lena but she's not a bad person and an omega who doesn't know she's an omega can get hurt badly in this mean old world so she needs someone to take care of her. She's going to learn the difference between Argentina and Mexico, the best way to eat a girl out, how to advance racial justice and how to make a mean breakfast in bed.  
> \-----  
> I don't think calling them "Kryptonite" makes sense especially since in the comics, that's the debris from Krypton and Krypton is intact here. So the standard green/red/blue/gold/silver/etc. are all variants of Harun-El that have been used medicinally over the ages. Metallic is a stand in for Platinum Kryptonite (platinum is a human name for an element on the periodic table whereas gold and silver are also words for a color) which is able to give humans Kryptonian powers on a permanent basis.

**Lillian Luthor - Sept. 1960 - El Paso, Texas**

Lex had assured her the gas was not poisonous to humans. Fortunately, adding a healthy spike of hydrogen cyanide was not hard. Her uncle's work at the Pentagon provided that. Lillian wanted poetic justice. Not much of the old Zyklon-B captured is stable still but she had snitches and up-jumped thugs to test it on. If her daughter is a sodomite, she is a danger to the species. Overzealous or not, the Germans knew how to deal with a threat.

Her thumb finds the swastika as her driver winds through traffic. She doesn't know why she kept the cartons, really. If the police find those on her, there will be an investigation and no doubt one that's hard to buy out.

"We're here, ma'am."

"Thank you, Clarence."

Lillian steps out of the car and sees several unfamiliar vehicles in her driveway. A truck, perhaps stolen. Robin's egg blue, this years Ford and with a king-size mattress in the bed. Sin on wheels. A faded but well kept Chevy with a doctor's bag in the passenger seat. That one is occupied so she gives it a wide berth. The silver-haired blonde inside is making notes on a steno pad. One of the gleaming, egg-shaped vehicles of the invaders which leaps skyward without a whisper.

Good. The field is clear.

\-----

Lena's in her bedroom, of course, sleeping. The roof is more holes than it is shingles and her bed has been dragged under what remains. The bed, the carpet and one of the drapes are soiled. Crusty with some vile fluid. Only when she sees the beasts, snoring, sprawled like animals on the floor, does she understand why. Monstrous organs hang from between the legs of two, even though they seem otherwise female. They must have had themselves castrated though. That leaves little mystery as to the type of corruption painting her daughter's belly and thighs and in splotches in a half dozen places on the floor, even if the lack of endowment means quantity remains an unholy mystery. The one who bedded down with it's tongue lolling on Lena's thigh has curled tight so as to keep it's own vulva in contact with Lena's ankle. It's grape-purple hair cut short with some crude instrument.

Lillian uncorks the canister and rolls it into the room. Scotch will help her clear that nightmare.

\-----

The back door opens.

"Lex!" she exclaims.

"You've been drinking, mother."

She shrugs.

"Lena and I had a disagreement."

"So I hear."

Lex pours himself two fingers from the bottle and two for her. He goes over to the sink to wash his hands. Good clean man, Lex. He'll make an excellent doctor.

"Tell me, mother. Did you know that my company has been working with spacemen?"

"Mmm," Lillian hums, savoring the amber liquid's burn. "Rumors, yes. I'm sure you keep it all very secret or they have you killed."

Lex chuckles.

"Not all of it. They mostly use my talents to _track_ a certain chemical. You might know of it. Green. Slightly radioactive. They use it in their scalpels and such. So their surgeons can work."

He sits beside her, his hand on her back.

"My next project is all the more interesting though. It seems our visitors had scouted. For centuries. I had discovered certain anomalies in my patients. One woman, poor dear, had been separated and confessed that she had been attempting to use a baseball bat to relieve her loneliness."

"Lex!"

"Let me finish, mother dearest. She claimed it was not uncomfortable but still, I kept her for observation. She went down with a fever not long after. A hundred and three at one point. Thought I might be about to watch one of my patients die for the first time. Rite of passage, sadly. Until her husband burst in, bawling, begging her forgiveness. The cure was curious, though. He fucked her!"

"Lex! Such talk is no-"

Lex swats her hand. Not beating her but silencing her all the same.

"They gave me bits, afterward. They didn't know why this happened to them but only that if she felt a fever like that, he could smell something was wrong with her and that was the cure they'd devised. A spaceman came to explain it to me later. Spacewoman, I suppose. The general of theirs. She had a young lady on each arm. Apparently, they were dying to see a human hospital. Their culture is not like ours, mother. Less puritanical, for one. For another, there are three sexes. Females with the capability to project a phallus and impregnate. Typically a rather frightening one, as I learned working with Masters and Johnson."

Lillian shivers. Those beasts upstairs.

"Is there a point to this, Lex?"

He chuckles.

"The general told me that they have not only three sexes, but an invisible dynamic amongst them. Alphas, Betas and Omegas. Omegas are peacemakers, mothers, fathers, teachers. I've watched one walk into a bar-fight on the ship and with one exhalation, push out a scent that dazed every man involved. Alphas are, well, like alpha wolves, I suppose. Almost unable to resist a challenge. Physically incredible specimens. Breadwinners. Defenders of their homes. Hunters. Killers, probably, in their distant past. Nose like a bloodhound, eyes like an eagle, ears like a bat even on their home planet. Even without their powers."

"Very interested in protecting those they love. Alphas most frequently marry omegas and ritual bites on the neck are a sign of the bonding."

_Each one of those animals had a fresh wound on the neck._

"Once more, is there a point to this, Lex?"

"There is. Sister dearest called me. Happy. She babbled about her school, new friends, young love. For an hour. I heard nothing but happiness. Usually, I have to cut short our calls after ten minutes because she's about to cry. So that was a first."

Lex tips his scotch over, wasting it on the floor.

"All of our Harun-El is tracked, mother. Every grain. I knew canisters were stolen before your thug made it to the docks."

Lillian scoffs.

"Too late. Those beasts are dead upstairs, as is your whore sister."

"We also coat them in gelatin and a diffusing agent. A green canister is never more than five percent strength and I keep gold in them too. Gold weakens the effect of green. That way if there's a spill, it's not fatal. When we need the stuff useful, I burn off the gelatin. Good innovation. They gave me a patent for the safe storage process."

Lillian's vision is becoming white at the edges.

"The cyanide was a nasty turn, mother."

He pulls the carton from her jacket pocket.

"Nazi cyanide? Good heavens. What, some sick artistic touch?"

He spreads them on the table like playing cards. He unfolds a note. It looks like her handwriting. 

"Tsk-tsk-tsk. What would papa say? You know he had nightmares about Utah Beach. Perhaps I shouldn't have spared you the pain. Lena is their omega, mother. You've threatened her. They'd be down here pulling meat off your bones if I hadn't started the upstairs bath when I came in. They're probably washing it off her."

He picks up the phone and covers the mouthpiece with his hand.

"I'm not a savage like you, other. Morphine. Massive overdose. You'll just...drift away. Better than you deserve, it seems."

"Operator? I need to speak to the police. It seems my mother has committed suicide."

"You ungrateful, stupi-"

The white gathers and Lillian fades.

* * *

**General Astra - Sept. 1960 - Outpost Thirteen - 15000km altitude, orbiting the Gulf of Mexico**

Nyssa nuzzles into her throat. Her petite, searingly-hot body is bare and curled around Astra's and her legs are over her lap. The particular curl of Astra's hand under her backside and covering her sex with her palm is the only modesty she has. Slick that has leaked through her fingers already stains her uniform. Her subordinates and the council members chuckle at it but Non, the capable Beta spy she uses, does look deeply jealous.

"Astra," she whines. "My _heat_."

She cups her hands over Astra's ear.

"Want your knot. Tired of just nursing pups. Want one for myself."

_Rao, that's all I need. Nyssa enjoys Lyta and Janya's pups at her breast so much I doubt she'll want to do anything else with her time._

"Shh, beloved."

Astra puts a kiss in her sweaty, lemony-bright hair.

"Is this accurate, Non?"

He nods.

"We've analyzed the device your niece used. It was a depleted ring casket. Used to provide an initial charge to Lantern rings. The fact that it hadn't disintegrated means it must have had charge left in it. Must have been sent into deep space when we destroyed Oa during the Green War."

"Sister, what do you think?"

Alura sighs. Her hair is sweaty but she has it loose over her shoulders, hiding it and her jewelry is sparkly enough to distract from the first shine of heat-sweat on her skin. She and Astra have lived in close quarters their whole lives, whether next door or next room. They're more than used to the cries of each other's partners. It has always been embarrassing but the fact is it gives them an always-ready fount of mockery to engage in. It seems that great minds think alike. Astra's own rut is two days off.

"Harun-El has been known to split beings, temporarily, in high doses. We've managed to prove the legend of Erok-El splitting himself into his courage, his love, his hope, and his madness in the epic poems."

"But the effect never persisted," Non reminds her.

"Suppose the Harun-El split my daughter into those same four things. The Lantern rings, which also interact with emotion, must have had a power source that seeks out and interacts with emotion."

Non leans back and groans.

"You're saying..."

Alura shrugs.

"I'm saying Harun-El clones last mere seconds, those ones are not going anywhere and I've never heard of a Red Lantern behaving like that so it's a theory. The lantern energy made the forms permanent. Perhaps they're milder because energy was consumed making the bodies, tracking the edge off. That's barely worth calling a hypothesis. A guess."

Non sighs.

"Shall I report that, general? Tell the Federation not to worry because the Red and the Black are too deep in rut? Ruts don't last and no omega, not even one that triggers your niece, will distract them long."

Astra fixes Non with a glare that makes him sink in his chair. Every alpha's nose twitches and most of them sit straighter. 

"Report _only_ that Red and a Black have emerged with no casualties and no assistance is needed. Assure them we're monitoring and if we glean information that can be useful against the feral Lanterns on the rim, we will share it immediately. That's the only information we're sure of at any rate."

Non dips his head, apparently satisfied. Alura clears her throat.

"You are the representative for the Medical and Population Command, Alura, you're free to bring matters to this committee."

Her sister smiles.

"I would like a separate transmission. Reporting the first Kryptonian and human-hybrid marriage and at that, one of a high house member."

Murmurs ripple around the room like a cold wind.

"Who?" Tok-Zod asks.

"My daughter Kara Zor-El has proposed to Lena Luthor, a half-human out of Seaela-Vex and heiress to the daughter's right in that house. Betrothal with a public ceremony at a date to be determined."

"Would you like us to lock the door on our way out, General?" her right-hand-man asks.

She can feel Nyssa's lips curl into a smile on her neck.

"Please. I can't have my Nyssa shivering and hurting all the way back to the shuttles."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got tired of Lex only ever being allied with Lillian...  
> \-----  
> Astra's behavior is only semi-scandalous. The Kryptonians used to intense public affection and discovering each other mid-sex. The fact that Astra has a mewling, horny-as-fuck lover on her lap simply means she was kind enough not to leave her lonely during the meeting and that also it would be kindest to all that the meeting be efficient.


	9. She's A Rainbow | Part 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:  
> This chapter is going to be a trail of smut and madness that cuts a path of ruin and woe across Texas and Mexico so I'm going to break it into multiple parts as I post it. When it's finished, I'll merge.  
> \-----  
> This is Jenny's redemption arc, if you will. She may not be worthy fo Lena but she's not a bad person and an omega who doesn't know she's an omega can get hurt badly in this mean old world so she needs someone to take care of her. She's going to learn the difference between Argentina and Mexico, the best way to eat a girl out, how to advance racial justice and how to make a mean breakfast in bed.  
> \-----  
> I don't think calling them "Kryptonite" makes sense especially since in the comics, that's the debris from Krypton and Krypton is intact here. So the standard green/red/blue/gold/silver/etc. are all variants of Harun-El that have been used medicinally over the ages. Metallic is a stand in for Platinum Kryptonite (platinum is a human name for an element on the periodic table whereas gold and silver are also words for a color) which is able to give humans Kryptonian powers on a permanent basis.

**Lena Luthor - Sept 1960 - El Paso, Texas**

Police have been filtering in and out of the house. The took pictures of the kitchen and her bedroom, the coroner was too happy to agree that Lillian died of morphine alcohol mixture and no one wanted to deal with the fact that Lena had hydrogen cyanide in the grime clinging to her skin or that it was Nazi-made stuff straight from the camps. When they were asked about holes in the roof, Kara explained that she struck a match after getting Lena into the hall. The cops just have bought it. Hydrogen burns, after all. Not if it's bonded with other things but beat cops aren't chemists.

She remembers looking at Lillian's body as they zipped up that bag and thinking only that the gurney might scuff the floors. She's not sure what that says about her.

Lex's plan was a marvel. Red, Black, and Violet left, heading off to Eliza's place outside of town. Her Kara slid a letterman's jacket onto her shoulders and put a crisp pair of Levi's on and that _fucking_ zipper is glinting in the edge of Lena's vision. Maddeningly. They washed her down, taking the scandalizing clues of their -- what do the boys call it, circle jerk? -- out of the equation. A bit of recreational arson hid the rest that had hardened into the carpet, drapes, even the wallpaper.

"You sure that you have a place to say, miss?" one of the detectives asks.

Lena nods.

"Lex can set me up."

He puts a hand on her shoulder.

"Might be a good time to pray. Pray that God can forgive your momma."

Lean looks up at him and wants to keep the snarl off her face.

_Pray? Yes, I will pray! I will offer my mother's suffering to Vhoc and sink myself into the Shadow of Flamebird, the aspect of Rao made weak! And I need you apes out of my fucking house so I can get out of these fucking clothes!_

"I will, promise."

Lex sits next to her on the bench in the parlor. The grandfather clock tick-tick-ticks.

"Please tell me I'm not next, Lex."

He puts an arm around her.

"Never. I'm in this, sister. More ways than one. Eve Tessmacher, I told you about her?"

"You never tell me about them, Lex. I made you promise you would if there was a second time."

He laughs and hugs her closer.

"Then I've been remiss. We've been together a few weeks now. My research into this seems to have...hmm..."

Lena chuckles.

"You brought home scent on you without realizing!" Lena giggles.

"I have a human nose!" he snaps.

"So she was a quarter? Eighth?"

Lex sighs.

"Worse. Full. One mother Omega, one Beta. They have some sort of external womb device. Originally sent to keep an eye on me to be sure I wasn't stealing research. Apparently I'm charming. Who knew?"

Lena huffs.

"I did, or I could see how you would be. You can be funny. You're easy to talk to. You never tried to charm a second time over _breakfast_ was the problem."

Lena whistles.

"My apologies in advance. Best cancel any cocktail parties, brother. I'm more than familiar with the _demands_ that we Omegas can feel. Raw pain. Every muscle seizing. Guts twisting into a tangle. Every scrap of my skin fevered and clammy and so sensitized silk felt like steel wool. Be with Eve, when she is like that. It's a kindness. _Non Nocere_ , brother. Do no harm. In that situation, that's what do no harm will require."

"I've been promised that is in my near future, yes. I'm beginning to feel very small as a puny human."

Lena kisses his cheek.

"Well, if you need any tips from your _more experienced_ sister, call me."

"God, this is embarrassing."

"I've earned it," Lena reminds him.

"You have. Be well. I have to fly back to Boston. Set things right. The lawyers will need to see you in a week or less, Lena."

"What? Why? Surely mother didn't leave me anything."

"Luthor Industries is a family company, sister dear. Privately held. Grandfather's descendants, unless we abdicate. I took my share to invest in LexCo. Meaning the only blood descendant of Lionel is you. I've warned Rogers that you intend to attend college and all that. He knows you'll be doing a lot by correspondence."

Lex checks his watch.

"Plane's don't wait."

Kara has been hovering, itching the blue marks on her neck.

"If you hurt her, I'll be very annoyed, Kryptonian."

"If I break her heart, I'll buy you the shovel and coat the knife in green myself," Kara promises.

Lex nods, satisfied. Lena opens her arms and flexes her fingers greedily.

"Take me home, Kara."

\-----

"Open your eyes," Kara whispers.

The Danvers' barn has been made into a lovenest. Black is busy testing the stove that was installed for leaks. Red is fluffing pillows and lighting a bedside lamp with a flash of heat vision. Violet is scattering rose petals on the pile of leather and lambskin that will be a bed. Her tongue is poking through her lips and she sometimes stops to rotate a petal. The pillows must have taken a flock of geese to make and there are three laundry hampers and a washtub in one corner and a claw-foot bathtub in another. Fresh turpentine glistens in every crack and there's a rainbow of paint cans next to the workbench. One of five workbenches, each of distinctly Kryptonian construction. 

"Our home, Lee. Unless you want something grander."

 _Grander?_ Lena wants to shriek. _Grander than somewhere I can be pampered, fucked, washed, fed, and go to work without taking more than ten paces in any direction?_

Nothing grander can ever exist and she knows it. 

"Oh."

Lena drops to her knees. The tears are coming from deep in her gut. Kara kneels down behind her and gathers her up. Black holds a cup of coffee to her mouth.

"Cream and two sugars, precious."

"Thank you," Lena sniffs, reaching for it.

"Let me, please. Just tell me when."

Black puts a finger on Lena's jaw. 

"You never have to lift a finger if you don't want to. If you want space, you'll have to ask, precious. Everything in me is telling you to feed you out of the palm of my hand. To wash your back so you can just sit in the bath and _feel_ and _relax_ and it's telling me I'd be happy to dress you just to feel the skin before I hide it."

_Oh, this is not good. This is a dangerous ego they're feeding._

"Coffee, please."

Black tips the cup slowly, stopping when Lena closes her lips and catching the dribble on her finger. 

_Some monster she is._

Lena licks her lips and four soft growls reply, each deep with promise.

With a suspiciously delicious cup of coffee in her belly along with hashbrowns and sausage -- perhaps Red Lanterns just know their meat -- Lena feels ready.

"Now, you've all had a chance to use me as a canvas. I want more. Ten hours till dawn and I need to go to school. Get to work. I want your knots."


	10. She's A Rainbow | Part 5A

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is going to be a trail of smut and madness that cuts a path of ruin and woe across Texas and Mexico so I'm going to break it into multiple parts as I post it. When it's finished, I'll merge.  
> \-----  
> This is Jenny's redemption arc, if you will. She may not be worthy fo Lena but she's not a bad person and an omega who doesn't know she's an omega can get hurt badly in this mean old world so she needs someone to take care of her. She's going to learn the difference between Argentina and Mexico, the best way to eat a girl out, how to advance racial justice and how to make a mean breakfast in bed.  
> \-----  
> I don't think calling them "Kryptonite" makes sense especially since in the comics, that's the debris from Krypton and Krypton is intact here. So the standard green/red/blue/gold/silver/etc. are all variants of Harun-El that have been used medicinally over the ages. Metallic is a stand in for Platinum Kryptonite (platinum is a human name for an element on the periodic table whereas gold and silver are also words for a color) which is able to give humans Kryptonian powers on a permanent basis.

**Kara Zor-El - Sept. 1960 - Southwest Texas (15 miles from El Paso, 1 mile from the Rio Grande)**

Lena's long, slim, _snowy_ fingers are plucking at the buttons of the borrowed shirt she wears. Her lips, long since cleaned of lipstick that's now on Kara's face and neck, are pink and quirked upwards and her eyes, _Rao's mercy,_ her eyes are the light, blue-washed green chlorine salt flats near Kandoor at mid-day. A deep, tropical sea had been there once and the salt had been it's foam. The left is paler, as if it had been formed an hour later or an age later, once Rao had rested from the labor. It's a shade Kara's not seen since shipping out. A color she never thought she might see again.

 _At midday, the light comes down to the salt straight on. Brightest then. Like a yellow star._

Lena's eyes are homes old and new. They're Earth's young, overeager golden star reigniting memories of Rao's lazy crimson blaze.

"Kara?" Lena prods.

Kara looks up, shaken from her daze makes a very un-alphalike squeak that wouldn't scare so much as a talaq. Lena is bare now, silver in the midnight, ankles crossed and arms pressed to her side. Offering. They call that position 'offering' some part of Kara's brain remembers. Some part that still has a language. It's the start of a dance. Alpha hands on Omega limbs and vice versa, shifting, seeking, sliding until the angles are right. It's meant for a swift, hard plunge. Meant for going tip-to-knot as fast as possible. Only one omega ever presented to Kara this way and Fendra was crazed with heat at the time. That was also the last time Fendra went anywhere near Kara.

Lena did it sound of mind, smiling and with some perfect, pleasant evil hiding in those seafoam green eyes. Lena must have read up because this is so perfect an arrangement of an omega maiden that any artist would beg to render it.

_I don't want to hurt her. She can't possibly be that slick..._

Kara glances down. Lena's lips are redder than her lipstick had been, swollen and so wet they're glinting in the candlelight. 

"Am I not what you hoped?" Lena asks, covering her breasts with an arm.

Kara blinks wetness from her eyes. Lena is pulling back, curling in, being shy because she failed to make her omega feel wanted.

"More," Kara growls. "Show yourself. Show me everything. Take every piece of you..."

Lena compiles with a quick gasp at the timbre of the command and a curl of those lips. She'd seen Lena's breasts. She'd painted them with her come as Lena's fingers danced on her shaft last night. This is different. Lena has one brought up one pale nipple to her pink tongue and is flicking it as she quirks one dark, sharp eyebrow.

"Do I have to do _everything_ myself?" she jokes.

Kara tilts her head this way and that, regarding her increasingly squirmy prey.

"Hmm. Maybe."

"Fuck," Lena gasps.

Kara lunges, watching the world turn blue and smeared all around her as she pushes towards lightspeed. She's on top of Lena before the light of her movement reached Lena's eyes. 

"If you want me to..."

Her hands pin Lena's wrists and _Rao_ she should have done something about her legs because Lena arches up to her the moment she registers her presence. Stiff nipples scrape through her T-shirt while soft, milky thighs have closed around her waist like a noose and she didn't remember to take her clothes off first.

"Gotcha," Lena teases.

Kara releases Lena's right hand and reaches for her fly. There's heat and scent coming off Lena in thick, confusing waves. Lena smells of humid, fruity forests and _life_ and the spiced, smoky mesquite from before is now smeared on an ripe mango in the middle of a jungle and she needs to be wrapped in it. Now. Her alpha is roaring about being denied too long and Kara is inclined to agree. When the first tooth opens, Lena's ears catch the noise and she perks up, eyes drifting down. Lena hums and pushes back up and a quick change of angle has her slammed back into the lambskin with Kara's knee.

"Good girls don't squirm."

Lena licks her nose.

"Good girls get pushed into the pillow and knotted until they can't talk from screaming so at this point I owe you nothing."

"M'kissing you first," Kara decides, bumping her cheekbones against Lena's so she'll turn. "S'nice to kiss you."

Tracing the mark with tongue and teeth, Kara tastes and breathes Lena and the zipper's cold, smooth brass is torture on her skin. Human-made briefs did not suffice.

Lena realizes this and hauls Kara out. Cool air hits her skin and the precome that's already leaked is exposed and it feels positively frigid in the barn air.

"I have been staring," Lena complains with a nip to Kara's nose. "I have been seeing quadruple all night. I have been _smelling_ quadruple and fucks sake, it's the same smell and it's not so my brain can't decide whether to go into one heat or four different ones every time I breathe. So unless you want to find another mate you are putting that cock in me now and you can kiss me _during_."

Red plops a cowboy hat on Kara's head for some stupid reason. Kara reaches up and tugs on the brim.

"Ma'am."

Lena rolls her eyes. 

"Oh you absolute assh-UHH!"

Lena's sentence dies in her throat when Kara slides in.

"Tight," Kara croaks. "S'warm. Feels good," she adds. Big words are for after.

The doing came before the feeling, probably because the feeling fills her brain to the brim and makes her heart slam madly into her ribs. Lena's cunt is molten and slick and hungry, muscles constricting and rippling in tune with her heartbeat. Kara's cock leaks quicker inside, adding her own slick to the sloshing, slurping mess. Her shaft is shivering in a rhythm that mimics Lena's walls.

"Just..." Lena gasps. "Is that all of it?"

Kara shakes her head.

"S'more like half."

Lena's eyebrow rises and Kara's proud she didn't spill at the sight of it.

"You're joking."

Kara hilts herself in Lena, slowly as she can so her lovely mate has every chance to protest even with her alpha screaming that Lena can _handle_ it. That Lena would like the _burn_ and the _stretch_ and get wet _because_ of it. Kara's not taking that chance. Lena's never done this and not one moment of it is going to be unpleasant for her.

"Christ and the Apostles!" Lena croaks. "Now?"

Kara shimmies her hips side, dragging her skin across Lena's damp black muff.

"S'all of it," Kara mumbles. "Took it all, pretty girl."

"Good," Lena huffs. "For now, just hold me?"

All pretense of the sassy, predatory siren is abandoned. Lena's arms open and Kara sinks into them. Lena lifts off the pillow for a kiss that starts to be more before a fresh splash of slick from Lena distracts them.

"I just want to have you inside," Lena groans, throwing an arm over her face. "Just see if I could come from that."

"S'not enough, probably."

"You try having your clit stretched like a rubber band and a red-hot, shaking, shivering, tickling _fucking telephone pole_ inside you an-"

"I want that, Lena."

Lena uncovers her face. Kara watches her eyes for some clue what she's thinking.

"I want that," Kara mumbles. "In the morning. I tend to shift back to female when I'm sleeping with you and with you in my nose, I wake up _soaked_. Don't want to be late for class so you'll have to wake me up with your cock, Lena. Please."

"Fuck me already," Lena snarls. "I swear if you had balls I'd yank them."

 _So the idea affected her too,_ Kara realizes. _Going to have all sorts of fun waking her with my tongue._

"And quit fucking grinning at me you clo-HOLYSHIT!"

Kara pulls back, slow, watching as Lena's head twists away and her flushed cheeks grind mindlessly into her glossy black hair where it fans out on the pillow.

"Put it back, put it back, put it back," she pleads.

With one slam, Kara bottoms out and her tip ghosts against's Lena's womb. Lena's walls fluter and then clench. Hard.

"Ride me."

"S'perfect," Kara grunts. "Perfect fit. You're perfect. M'perfect inside you. Perfect."

Lena grabs Kara's right hand and guides it down her ribs to her hip.

"There," she sighs. "For leverage."

There, right there, with the woman of her dreams in her arms...Kara comes up short for the first time. 

She makes a strangled, extremely unsexy noise and lunges with all her might, burying her knot in Lena before it even halfway forms and pumping her come into Lena's depths so fast it splashes out around the incomplete knot. She topples forward onto Lena will the charm of a dead tree. Below her, Lena cackles, shaking her perfect breasts and making her silver skin turn ruby from her ears to her ribcage. Lena was trembling like a guitar string and Kara literally got two pumps in.

Rao, despite her dearest wishes, does not see fit to let the Earth swallow her up in that moment.

"M'sorry," Kara mumbles. "S'nice, being inside you."

Lena's hand's find hers and she tangles their fingers. When her laughing finally stops, her lips press to Kara's cheek.

"Felt good for me too, while it lasted. Nice to find one thing you can't do perfectly," she teases into Kara's skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nobody's perfect. This won't be their only sex scene or Lena's only flaunting of her size kink by any...stretch.  
> (I'll show myself out)


	11. She's A Rainbow | Part 5B

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is going to be a trail of smut and madness that cuts a path of ruin and woe across Texas and Mexico so I'm going to break it into multiple parts as I post it. When it's finished, I'll merge.  
> \-----  
> This is Jenny's redemption arc, if you will. She may not be worthy fo Lena but she's not a bad person and an omega who doesn't know she's an omega can get hurt badly in this mean old world so she needs someone to take care of her. She's going to learn the difference between Argentina and Mexico, the best way to eat a girl out, how to advance racial justice and how to make a mean breakfast in bed.  
> \-----  
> I don't think calling them "Kryptonite" makes sense especially since in the comics, that's the debris from Krypton and Krypton is intact here. So the standard green/red/blue/gold/silver/etc. are all variants of Harun-El that have been used medicinally over the ages. Metallic is a stand in for Platinum Kryptonite (platinum is a human name for an element on the periodic table whereas gold and silver are also words for a color) which is able to give humans Kryptonian powers on a permanent basis.

**Lena Luthor - Sept 1960 - El Paso, Texas**

Lena's first sensation is warmth. Encompassing, surrounding, total. Warmth.

She hums happily and stretches and four hands, powerful and sure, grab her hips and her ribs.

"Stay," Kara breathes. The original. The blue tattoos on her throat slide as she pleads with Lena.

Violet is behind her, clingy as a koala bear and chuckling happy to herself.

Red and Black appear to be settling a debate about the merits of emotion versus emotionlessness. Judging by Black's wailing as Red sinks her cock in, deep and fast with hair gathered in a fist and snarling in Kryptonian, it's a tie. Red is making some cogent points about passion and Black is making points about an empty void needing to be filled. Both are sweating and trembling. Definitely a tie.

"Kara," Lena whines. "Physical manifestations of your emotions are fucking each other."

Kara snorts.

"I really should have something to say to that but I really don't. They're different beings, Lena and probably only going to get more different as time goes on. Those two, especially. Raw anger versus total, immovable calmness? Opposites attract," Kara suggests, finishing in a catlike yawn complete with tongue curl.

"And if you think this is weirdly hot for you, well..."

"Noted," Lena sighs.

"We have to go to school."

"Yeah. Don't want to. Met this cute omega last night."

"Oh?" Lena chortles. "Tell me more."

"She's...everything."

It explains nothing and means well, everything to hear that so Lena doesn't prod.

After getting her feet over the edge of the bed, Lena comes to a realization.

"Ahh!" she hisses. "Let's do more foreplay next time. That or I get to enjoy it more."

"S'nice," Kara mumbles into the pillow. "I'm gonna like having your legs around my neck."

The plan is decided over breakfast. Red will go to a local reform school that doesn't ask too many questions about where the troublemaker came from. This will put her in a position to defend any innocents or untriggered hybrids there. Black will go to a Catholic school up the road, which Lena suspects will boil over eventually, probably cutting into the diocese's deep stable of nasty nuns but that's not her problem. Violet will go with her and Kara, female shifted, dolled up and flirty and well...Lena has no doubt that those rubes won't spot the similarities.

If this sweaty, trembling heat in the skin on her neck is any clue, Lena will know if they're in trouble because she's fairly certain that four Kara's worth of lust for her are being funneled into those marks.

Kara requested communicators for her 'mirrors' as she decided to formally call them but that's not quick. The minerals don't exist on Earth and protecting humans from themselves has kept the factory decks redlined, Kara told her, producing enough gear for the peacekeepers.

Kara suggested she start going by "Karl" to help her remember to pretend to be male.

\-----

The plan, if it could be called that, is ruined at the school's front door. Jumpy parents and shouting, spit-slinging, red-faced ministers are packed into the lawn.

They're all zeroed in on two passages. Sodom and the Whore of Babylon.

"What in Vhoc's hole?" Kara mutters. "Did I miss a flyer about a religious war?

"Who?"

"Evil god. Not like, the devil. Cruelty and death. Like a walking corpse."

"So his asshole equals not a good place," Lena chuckles. "Carry on, spacewife."

The penalty for using the word 'wife' is severe. 

Lena is tossed in the back of Kara's truck, driven to a nearby patch of woods, laid out on the hood and Kara's powerful, soft palms push her legs apart. She searches with nose and tongue and lips to find her favorite tasting parts of Lena and the next thing Lena knows, she's scaring birds from the trees with her yelps.

Kara is not fucking stopping and there's a hot, bright, burst of a _pure feeling that Lena hasn't heard the name of_ and then Holy Mother of God her body _can just do more of those if Kara keeps licking_ and that's something that the _Church had never considered when_ picking what was _holy and merciful_ she's pretty sure. 

She's gushed enough slick into Kara's cupped palm that Kara can lap it up and slurp rudely for the better part of a minute before she's cleaned off and that's probably the best way to loosen herself up tonight for round two, Lena realizes.

The crowd has thinned when Kara drives Lena back.

The police are here now, separating two bloody-knuckled boys who are past animal in their snarls at each other.

"Alphas," Kara whispers. "Quarter, at most. Rutted and thinking with their knots. Embarrassment to the light of Rao..."

The principal pounces on them the moment they're inside the door.

"Oh, Mister Danvers. Thank heavens. Come with me!"

Kara looks helplessly at Lena who can do nothing but toddle along on legs more noodle than muscle. 

He leads them to the auditorium, shoves them inside and points at the stage. The only light in the room is above the microphone. Everything else is pitch black. 

"We herded them all in here. We tried to pull them apart, one of the girls threw Mister Johnson halfway down the hall. Tell them to stop," he begs. 

"Me?" 

"They'll look up to you. You're going to get us to State, I just know it."

Kara is practically marched up on stage and then the man flees, covering his eyes. The lights are down but the sounds Lena hears around her are telling. In the rows behind her, Lena hears two groups of people and rumbling, basso voices and unmistakable suckling the creaking and protests of chairs being fucked out of the bolts holding them down.

Halfway down the row, there's breathy, worn-silk-and-aged-leather female voice and every now and then a _'good girl'_ and _'mmm'_ and _'lick, don't suck'_ and a dozen different soft sounds.

Lena barely needs to think before leaving the aisle and sliding a few seats away from the woman's voice. The mix of expensive perfume -- nothing like that is sold at Dillard's or Sears -- and the woman's musk is heady in Lena's nose, so much so that she's surprised she's not frothing and gasping herself.

 _Because she's an alpha but not my alpha,_ Lena realizes. _Powerful scent. Not Kara's, though. Runner up._

No time like the present for practice.

_These other two... Omega, like strawberry, syrup and fried dough... The other one is a beta? It's female and smells like oranges and summer grass but I neither I want to take it nor do I want to give in to it. So that must be what a beta smells like. Themselves._

"Lena."

"Andrea," her new seatmate whispers. "Mmm... This is Jenny. My other, Kelly, she's..."

"Let me guess. They wouldn't let her in the door?"

Lena nods.

"A shame. She's a friend."

Andrea chuckles.

"So I had that purple-haired friend of yours sneak her in."

Violet makes herself known with a fragrant gust of wind and a kiss to the back of Lena's earlobe. Static electricity dances on the seat's metal arms.

Andrea gives a strangled little gasp.

"Jenny, slow. Slow when mistress is talking to people," she scolds.

"Jenny Talbot, huh?"

"Mmm. A woman much like your friend up their brought her. Red tats, red hair. Fucked her boneless and gave her to me so that none of these floppy dicked little boys could hurt her. This is so much _gentler,_ isn't it pet? You'll still be ready to dance and jump and whatever those _hijo de putas_ in the stands get so excited about."

Andrea laughs.

"Though I admit I find myself partial to the skirts she wears."

After probably ten minutes of staring helplessly at the room and failing to actually push air out of her mouth and make words, Kara shuts off the mic and walks over to the backstage area.

The trills of a phone being dialed follow.

"Yes, operator? I need El Paso 4413 please."

Kara hums and before long, she's explaining something in a whisper Lena can hear bright as a bell probably sixty feet away. Lena can't make out the other end but she suspects she could with more practice.

"The whole school, Eliza."

"Yes. Only one of them knows what's happening to her, besides Lena. I doubt she'll be any trouble. Andrea's a well-to-do exchange student. She's very polite and she's got more than enough _entertainment_ right now."

"Can you come, please? It's not my place to explain this to them. If Alura or Astra did it, they wouldn't trust it. I'll make sure Lena has them let you in. Thank you."

Lena hops up and opens the door to find the principal wringing his hands.

"What is your problem, Mr. Svenson? S-he! is a student, not a teacher and this is your responsibility, not Kara's."

"Kara?"

"Karl, whatever. Why are you putting him in charge? Because he's the quarterback?"

"No," Svenson mumbles. "Not as such."

"Because he's not a teacher," Lena realizes. "Next best role model."

"Perceptive as always, Miss Luthor. Before I turned the lights down, I _saw_ things. Things it isn't proper in my place to have ever seen. No matter th-th-the...delicate situation...or any deviance to be health with. the sight of Miss Talbot's breasts is not something I can be privy to."

 _He panicked,_ Lena realizes. 

He was stuck watching students he is supposed to guide and make behave themselves suddenly start fucking each other and he was unable to not see things it would be perverted, immoral and in fact criminal for him to see in any circumstance. 

For the first time in two years, she adds something to the mental tally she keeps that actually increased her respect for the man.

"And Miss Rojas? What of her?"

"Perhaps things are different in Argentina, I would not know. She apologized for her outburst, asked after Mr. Johnson well being and was nothing but genteel after that and thanked me for turning down the lights and was in a sense, fully clothed. She had covered her lap, Miss Talbot's head whatever I might have seen with a jacket."

Lena pinches her nose.

"Mother of God," she groans. "So you have no idea what's happening. Karl is having a doctor come in who can explain more. If you would like to know what is happening before she arrives, I could explain it."

"Your Irish accent has returned, Miss Luthor. From your Christmas abroad."

"Well," Lena huffs. "I suppose it comes out with frustration then."

"Please educate me, so to speak. Thirty two years and I've never felt so confused or afraid for my students."

He unlocks a science classroom, waves his hand to stop the teacher from saying anything and guides Lena to a seat in the back, far away from the others but in full view for honesty's sake.

\-----

"Alpha, like wolves?" Svenson asks. "As in the dominant wolf?"

"Not quite, no. There is an element but it is..."

Lena sighs.

"Well, without giving you any details of Karl and myself I would say it's ritualized playing, not actual competition. There is a possessiveness that with anger, can become intense and dangerous. You saw those boys fighting out front."

"But what wife isn't possessive of her husband, or vice versa? For me and Karl it's move, counter move, dare and double dare. More like that. The terms spacemen use are not perfectly translatable but I shall do my best. In this case, think of it as Alpha as the letter in Greek. Beta and Omega in the same sense."

Then it clicks. Everyone around her is trying to understand this as sin, as God, Satan, Heaven and Hell and Adam and Eve and from a viewpoint of human religions.

"In Revelations, sir, there is a point where God refers to themselves as Alpha and Omega. Which, clearly, we are not meant to take as God being both top dog and bottom dog."

Svenson's eyes widen, just a hair.

"Too true. Meaning beginning and end, of course. Go on."

Lena taps her fingernail on the desk. She needs to trim them, she realizes. They have places to be, after all. Tender places. How she'll explain to the manicurist why she wants them so short she does not know.

"Precisely. And beta was not mentioned there because it was neither extreme. For the spacemen, the words are ancient and come from more like 'spark' or 'rock' and 'kindness' and it operates more like left and right halves. Betas are betas not because they come after Alphas but because they are not at either end at all. The two poles of Alpha and Omega share that unspoken form of romantic interaction but betas do not."

"Betas are freer. None of the cycles I described and more even-tempered and patient and yes, weaker. But an Alpha is far stronger than it needs to be in the first place. On the other hand betas are much less fertile, resilient and are not high endurance as omegas. Karl's strength is in his arms. Mine is...everywhere, I suppose. The difference between lifting a child's bed with a finger and not dropping from exhaustion after chasing them around the house or becoming frustrated after a hundred questions from a dozen small mouths."

Lena chuckles.

"This is a gross oversimplification but if you want people born to teach, or be doctors, lawyers, or be police officers, or anything like that? Where calming, caring, and making amends is the key? Find omegas. If you want architects and scientists and priests and agitators and soldiers, find alphas. And if you want people born to be like you, sir, in administrative roles, betas are perhaps most well suited. Unflappable. Difficult to distract."

"Ah."

Svenson seems to have absorbed everything and even started taking notes.

"It seems there will be no preventing days like today, only moderating them?"

"I'm afraid so. From my illness last week, when I first discovered this, I can tell you that ignoring the urge and not at least holding hands or laying down and simply being with the person to keep company is a short path to a hospital bed, not a classroom. That's where I was, those three days. In a hospital."

"Good lord. That will take some paperwork. I suppose it's a consolation that every school in Texas will be doing the same. What can you tell me about the scent?"

"Only that it would not make itself known to you, at least not understandable. Karl, for example, smells like the moment after a thunderstorm to me and because of my interest, his scent commands the entire room when I am with him. Miss Rojas's scent is dimmer but still very clear. Peppers, mango and mountain air. I doubt you would smell the same because I think my brain is associating it with memories."

"Fascinating," Svenson mumbles, filling another whole page with notes while she gives him space.

"In another life, you would have made a fine chemist, Miss."

_In another life if I was a man, he means._

"I aim to do that or something like it in _this_ life. Who's to say, anymore?"

He chuckles.

"I suppose we went from factories staffed by women churning out bombs to spaceships in the sky, didn't we?"

"We did, sir. Whatever we thought the end of the war would look like, it wasn't this. Do you have any other questions?"

"You're certain this strictly hereditary? That is it not infectious and that most students won't experience it?"

"Hereditary, yes. It resides in the body and can be triggered by scent or by maturation but it cannot be passed on, only brought out. They've been here for centuries, monitoring us. Some of them, we are learning, passed the time with locals. Till death do we part, I suspect, given that they do not age here."

"My suspicion is they are here to preserve us so that one day, we can be one people. As for numbers here at school, Kara and myself working together could detect the others attending currently."

"How?"

"The scent would instinctively drive them closer either as potential mates for her or as competitors for my affections. We would both notice. I could offer the same service St. Margaret's and the Reformatory for Young Women, where Kara's relatives attend."

"Her? You keep saying _her._ "

Lena grins.

"Karl is actually Kara. Kara Zor-El, a spacewoman and well, royalty, in their view. Dr. Danvers raised her in the summers with her daughter mostly so Earth would feel like home."

"Are you not..."

"...female myself? Yes. To borrow from your concerns about propriety earlier I can assure you there is no situation whatsoever where I would attempt to seduce you, or indeed any man alive. Men hold no interest."

"You just made what is, in my view, the loveliest woman to ever live quarterback, sir. Girls of course, do not play sports, let alone football. So if you were to feel compelled to disclose my own sexual deviancy or shame Kara in any fashion? You might find Kara's gender reported to the State Board of Education, the athletics association, and the papers. Were the close relative of one of the spacemen's military commanders to come to some sort of harm? Well..."

Svenson groans, making several students turn their heads.

"I have no interest in that, sir. I'd rather go to school, receive my diploma from here and press on in life. Rather be there for a kiss after practice than busy myself with either the scandal among the student body for my deviancy or legal action against you or anyone. You've seen what she can do. You've seen what spacemen can do in general with their strength. Back on the field? She didn't take those tackles. She went around. Slid under then and then turned, moving them off. Mimicked being tackled so that the other man wouldn't break a bone."

"Win games and keep our secret or suffer uncomfortable questions, sir. I'm afraid those are your options."

Lena sighs.

"Lastly. Allow Kara to attend and do her own schoolwork. I beg you. Learning is important to them, to her. This sort of cheating disgusted her. Kara spoke at length about shaming not only herself but the teachers by not doing the work. I can assure you that between her mind and my tutoring, she'll pass."

Lena offers her hand.

"Since I just inherited my mother's company, shall we consider this my first business deal? You receive Karl as a quarterback with Kara being our mutually beneficial and in my case, pleasurable secret? Shake on it?"

Svenson huffs.

"I think that Standard Oil and US Steel have rough seas ahead with a woman at the helm of Luthor Industries."

They shake. 

Svenson leaves. 

Lena returns to the auditorium as Eliza is finishing her explanation and the omega-scented home economics teacher is passing out blankets with her hand over her eyes.

Kara mouths 'thank you' to Lena.

Lena realizes she just betrayed Kara's privacy in a dozen different ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Hijo de mil puta!"_ (literal: "son of a thousand whores!") is an Argentine swear that more correctly translates as "son of a bitch" or something. I dropped 'mil' ("thousand") so it was a more Americanized "son of a bitch."   
> \-----  
> Lena took pity on the poor bastard since he's got two dozen of these horny nutjobs in his school now. One of whom could buy up the entire school district's real estate with a letter to her staff and one of whom could slice his eyeglasses off his nose with heat vision.
> 
> She has the leverage since girls don't play football but he wants to win and so he really can't hurt her like she can him. Time will tell what him knowing the secret means...
> 
> \-----  
> Please keep in mind that Lena referring to herself as 'deviant' is in this case, not necessarily a self-deprecating comment. 
> 
> Sappho and by extension Lesbos, her home island, anchor the concept and are obscure, classical and literary and thus only something that educated folks would stumble upon.
> 
> The term lesbian was not in widespread public advocacy use in the 1950s or 1960s even by activist groups like the Daughters of Bilitis (the pre-eminent early lesbian rights group) and popularization of the concept would probably have varied from place to place. 
> 
> While the group as criticized in the San Franciso election in 1959 as a "Lesbian organization" it did not use the term itself in outwards-facing flyers or their magazine _the Ladder_. 
> 
> As late as the 1960s, many writers held Sappho up more as an autonomous woman with her own artistic merit, a feminist figure rather than, or in addition to, being a queer figure. Her primary or only association being well, **sapphic** is fairly recent.
> 
> Professors living in Boston with roommates in "Boston Marriages" would have known of Sappho. Lena, educated as she is, would most likely not have without seeking out a group like DOB and most likely meeting a member face to face. Groups like DOB were not using the term in public, or in mailings (the Postmaster General routinely censored and punished groups based on the contents of the US Mail) in fact using a name derived from "The Song of Bilitis" because it was an extremely obscure French novel about a fictional associate of Sappho. 
> 
> One founder stated that this allowed them to claim they were just a "poetry club" if asked or if someone asked their daughter why she was writing to them. Their own mission statement did not include the word, using "homosexual", "sex deviant", "variant" and so on while also calling for the legalization of lesbian sexuality and recognizably modern advocate's goals.
> 
> Their conference also had "Damnation and Donuts" event where they brought a pastor in to yell at them about sin while they ate donuts. The original bad-asses, so to speak.
> 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Bilitis>


	12. She's A Rainbow - Part 5C

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Kara's (Kara, Red, Black, Violet) all share her memories up to the point of separation, including her school work, movies, television she might have seen...pranks Alex played.
> 
> We're going to meet the new ones and see what their days at school are like.  
> \-----  
> If you want music to go with the feels, I listened to "Give My Love to Rose" by Johnny Cash while writing this.

**"Red" - El Paso, Texas, 1960**

Red looks up at the hand-drawn map Lena gave her.

The building barely merits the term. No sign. Three windows. More a box with bricks over it than a structure of any meaning or weight. It could do with some reshaping. Particularly that part in the front. That's where an important man might put his office.

With two of those three windows all to himself.

"Do important men sound different screaming?" Red asks a human sitting nearby and mostly herself.

"Beg, pardon, young lady?"

She glances over. The human man she spoke to is old, bent and wrinkled and in her hands he would come open like a paper bag with red candy in it. All the same, something in him stills her. She stares at his eyes with hers. Her puplis are crimson ringed, ageless, flawless, with the power crackling behind them to slaughter in a glance. His eyes are shiny and one is clouded, grayed with decay and still, something reflects back.

"The Texas Reformatory School for Girls. Is that it?"

"Mmm. 'Fraid so. Don't mind my saying, you don't seem like a reffie girl."

"How so?"

"Well, didn't tell me to fuck myself. Seems like that's unusual."

Red scoffs.

"If you'd rather..."

He laughs, loud and sharp as his body allows. Then he coughs.

"No need to be accommodating, little lady. I'm doing just fine on this bench. Wasn't where I meant to do my dying but it'll serve. Do a little today, walk home. Tomorrow, go through the parks and feed the ducks. Then come here and do some more dying. It'll take, sooner or later," he chuckles.

"Where did you figure you'd die?" she asks him.

This human intrigues her. This breakable _animal_ makes her want to know more about it. The arrogance of making her curious makes her angry and for that, she must figure out why.

So she sits down near him.

"Belleau Wood. It was near the end of the war. Not this one."

He coughs, catching some phlegm and blood in a cloth before it's done.

"The First World War, you mean? I read about it."

"Yes."

"How much did you read?" he asks.

"Less than you lived, I imagine."

He lifts his sleeve and shows an image cut into wrinkled skin, painted black. Bright ink on fading canvas. The globe, the way humans present their Earth in myth and book, crossed by two ship's anchors.

"Second Marines. Krauts were tired. They knew if they weren't in Paris by nightfall, they might not be there in the morning to try again. Frenchmen weren't doing so hot either. June. God's, it was hot. There was a hill, fuck knows what the Frenchmen called it. We just had it as Hill 142 on the maps. We took it but that turned out to be the easy part. I was a Master Sergeant with the 73rd Company. Man ahead of me, Dan Daly. He looks at the woods. Bullets coming out of the woods like the devil was taking a piss on us. Looks at his men. Dan says..."

The old man closes his eyes.

"Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?" he whispers, smiling wide.

"They just walked in. It was a swamp. By the time the brass knew something was wrong, might've been dry land, we'd left enough of our brother's bodies to soak it up."

"But you lived."

"Ah!" he says, brightening a bit. "Trick was not to walk. You ran. You ducked. You didn't march. You came at the krauts like you was a possum with barbed wire up its ass. Spitting and swinging. Shovels. Shovels worked good."

He pretends to swing something heavy.

"You'd fold 'em, see? They had a way to fold 'em. Was meant for digging a foxhole to hide in. Well, they weren't good at that. We'd sharpen 'em. We learned to sharpen them after that. Swing it right and the weight did half the work. It'd take a man's break a shoulder bone off and cut his throat at the same time."

"They called us devil dogs after that. Krauts were all up in them woods still. But we had a piece. Not a big piece, miind. More than the day before. Now them Krauts had to take it back to keep going. Weren't too long before shit went wrong again. Germans coming from everywhere. French soldiers grabbed one of the guys from the 5th. Williams. Captain Williams. Said we needed to retreat. He just looked at that bastard and sa-"

Red smiles.

"Retreat? Hell! We just got here!" she laughs.

"Yeah. Guess you know."

"Saw the movie."

"That's a good girl," he sighs, patting her knee. "No one talked about what I said."

"What'd you say?"

He laughs.

"Not much. Yelling, mostly. Said 'yes' and 'sir' a lot, remember that. Near shit myself a couple of times. Whistled at a girl, I seem to recall. Screamed, when they shot me."

He taps his chest, atop the lung that isn't filling as quickly as the other.

"Come to think, might be a reason they didn't write down what I said."

His breath is slower now, softer, _smaller._ Red can tell. He closes his eyes.

"Think you can sit awhile?" he pleads. "Thinking the dying might be working a bit better today."

"Does it hurt?" Red asks.

She wouldn't know. She is incapable of being injured on this world, in fact, on any world. Her birthright from Rao now blending with the blazing yellow sun and a hateful hum in her ears and the blood that's hissing and snarling and boiling in her veins.

"Yeah," he admits. "Hurts like hell."

She glances over at him, looking him up and down with every sense she has. There, near the tangled blood vessel. The one that is killing him. Strangling his brain, turning great chunks of it gray and useless. Two fingers would reach around the spine so easily and crack it. Nothing would be left to feel it.

"If...if...if you want I could help you along?"

She isn't sure why it was hard to say. Why should killing be hard to talk about? She hasn't killed but she knows she can. Easily. The thing that makes her angry, makes her mate bite from Lena red rather than blue or black or violet, _wants_ her to.

He opens one eye.

"Wouldn't be opposed, girl. Had to do it myself. Kill men I loved. More'n I loved my own brothers. They weren't getting any better and neither am I. When a man asks, there's no wickedness in it. Dying slow isn't pretty. Dying fast is fast. At least. It's a mercy. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

"If you're sure?"

He nods.

"Let me pray a spell, first."

He does, he nods again. She places her hand on the back of his neck.

"Give the order."

"You'd have been a good Marine, girl. Can tell somehow."

He puts something in her hand. An animal skin pouch. Wallet, the humans call it. 

"There's a note. She'll know."

"Now do it!" he snarls.

Red squeezes. It doesn't even break the skin, he's so brittle. It's done.

Inside the wallet is a paper from the government, something called a pension note. With it is an address, a pair of photos and a name. Rose. A photo of the man she just killed, dressed in his uniform, in his prime. When his skin was white and clean, not yellowed and ruined. Another photo of the woman who must be Tose. Curiously, her skin is dark. She's a negro and the address is in that part of town.

Perhaps that's why he didn't take the note himself.

Red takes only the note and the photo. 

His name was Howard Cronton. More than any human she's met, she felt Howard at least, knew rage.

That he knew killing. The iron smell, the salt-tang of blood splashed on the tongue as she roars. Sticky and hot, painting her face with each swing. The gurgling of the beaten and the roar of the triumphant.

Kara understands humans, somehow. More deeply and more kindly than some humans understand each other.

Red doesn't think she ever will. She understands the life of Private First Class Howard Cronton, though. The thing he excelled at was the thing the world stopped wanting from him.

This is a school for children who do not behave, Lena explained.

Disobedient.

Skipping class is disobedience.

\-----

If the white men who linger at the edge of the tracks thought they could stop her entering, they were educated when she shattered the right arm of the one who laid hands on her.

She walks to Rose's house.

Knocks.

Waits.

Rose emerges. She looks old enough to have had a daughter who would be a bit older than Red. Perhaps that daughter Rose had is now having one of her own. She looks younger than Eliza, despite being much older. She is perhaps better fed and kept or perhaps the darker-skinned woman on Earth are simply stronger. More durable. Hard to tell. 

Rose might no younger than Howard, most likely she's not. The years have been kinder. Much so. 

"Howard died," Red tells her. "I sat with him while he died. He wanted you to have these."

She hands over the photo first, then the paper.

"He never married," Rose chuckles. "Course that stiff old bastard never married. Followed him here from that damn hospital in New Orleans. Always hoping. Pretty sure Jessica ain't Tom's daughter if I'm being honest before God. Suppose he didn't because the wife would get the pension."

"Could you witness, girl? Leave a way to reach you? So that when the judge asks, I have a white woman say yes, I signed this?"

Red nods. She takes the pad and writes Eliza's address down.

Rose signs. She takes Rose's cheeks in both hands and thanks Red for sitting with 'Howie' when he was dying.

Red walks back to school.

It was pleasant, helping a killer tidy his affairs.

Calming. 

She wishes to do another favor so when she reaches the train tracks, she grabs the arm of the man she wounded and snaps the bone back in place, burning the crack shut with a slow swipe of her heat vision. The scar will be tall, black and gnarled but he can use the arm. At least he can feed himself with that hand. He certainly can't fight with it.

"Don't guard places that aren't yours. That's not what guarding means," she tells them, loud enough to be heard over the screams.

\-----

When she gets back to the school, the principal and two large, unhappy-looking human males with flat wooden sticks are outside.

Some of the students are whispering, telling lies about her. Maybe not lies? If they don't know the truth, those are guesses. The principal asks where she was, Red isn't sure how to answer. It doesn't seem like he wants information.

"Well, where were you? Class starts at nine, young lady."

"Killed a man," Red shrugs. "Took a walk after."

"Are you lying, girl? Are you sassing me?"

"Does it matter? Would you treat me differently if I was or would the beatings be the same, either way?" she asks.

"You listen here, you li-"

"The same, then. Beat me. Beating me will not break me or wear me down. Beating me will not train me. Beat me and it will merely tire you out. When the moment comes where I choose to fight you, you will face the same beast you would have if you had fed me and pampered me for every moment."

She walks past and the principal just stares at her.

A girl with white hair and very pale skin darts past him and grabs Red's hand.

"Wow. That was badass. We're going to be good friends, I can tell. I'm Leslie. Come on. I'll show you where we smoke."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Red is my play on Red Lantern Kara from the comics who is distinct in many ways from Red Kryptonite Kara in the show. Fueled by the rage of what happened to Krypton, combined with new trauma, she goes on more of an anti-hero arc than full villain, punishing and killing as she sees fit. In fact, she primarily attacks villains like Lobo during this arc.
> 
> She is eventually cleansed by a Blue Lantern and returns to a more normal state.  
> \-----  
> Though told out of order, these are both events that happened in the Battle of Belleau wood, creating two of the most famous one-liners in US Marine Corps history.  
> \-----  
> Where did you think Leslie Willis (Livewire) went to school in this verse?


	13. She's a Rainbow - Part 5D

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kryptonite is a bit like mescaline, Lantern Rings can be used like candy wrappers and the only person ready for what's coming is Lena.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Black Lanterns are powered by "death" as their emotion (grief is an emotion, death isn't but oh well) and are less described in DC Canon than Green, Yellow or Red. They typically only occur in comics where someone (in one case Harly Quinn) needs to go Full Dark and Gritty(tm) so there's not much to work with.
> 
> I decide that what separates Black from Red is that reds are angry and _enjoy_ violence and killing while Blacks are more of an uncaring Grim Reaper type, simply seeing to it that death happens. Rather than death (again, DC, not an emotion!) let's say their emotion is apathy or something of the sort. They'd be really great at meditation because emptiness is their emotional efault.

**"Black" - El Paso, Texas, 1960**

"So, tell me how you feel."

Black is puzzled by the human in front of her.

"The chair is..."

_Practically torture._

"Lightly padded. Is that the correct answer?"

The human is a male, midway through it's life cycle, and the hair is white in some places and brown in others on the...thing on it's face. Seg-El, her grandfather, had a beard. Old fashioned, by then, but he was proud of it. Fussed on it. Preened it. Much joked upon in Argo City. Much swooned over by loose women in the slums of Kandor, the story goes. 

That is no beard. That is a reason to breed the ability to grow hair out of human beings.

"There's no right or wrong answer to that question. I just want to help you."

Black nods.

"You could let me leave."

"Do you not want to be here?"

Black taps her fingers on her knee.

She could kill him. She knows this. She could sterilize this planet in seconds. She could burn them all and in the ashes, raise a palace for Lena. That is her purpose, after all. To cause death, distribute it, to even the universe out to a cold, natural state of nothingness. When it has a purpose. Killing him does not serve that. She sees no indications why his life is closer to ending than others in the school his age and entropy is low here. The chances he would die randomly in the next few hours are small.

That is not her place.

Three beings on the planet can possibly oppose her and one more she would lay her life down before letting harm come to. Four in the whole multiverse who can stop her and yet she cannot answer this small, short-lived, sniffling thing in front of her. 

"I'm just bored, I suppose."

"Ah," the male with the abominable face-thing replies. "Perhaps we should put you in more advanced classes, then."

"Yes," Black replies. Her mouth is dry and her tongue feels too thick. "Perhaps so."

\-----

Her partner in chemistry leans over. It is a welcome distraction from an experiment seemingly meant to demonstrate lithium-water reactivity. Surely Earth cannot be _that primitive_ as to need that demonstrated. Have they no simulations, no computers?

"Black, right?"

"Yes. That is ah...me."

The girl speaking to her has modified her uniform subtly, so as not to anger the nuns. She did not shorten the skirt. She rubbed it so it looks more threadbare. She did not raise the blouse or pad it or remove buttons. She used some other chemical to clean it, rending it grayer, duller.

"It neat, how you don't care."

"Thanks? I think?"

"I mean," her lab partner laughs. "Why get all worked up? We're all going to die, right? Just _pop_ and they'll tell you that oh, some big bearded Sky Santa is going to be there to give us a hug but what if he's not? I mean, if my family is any indication, there is no God. So if after we die, what if that's just...it?"

"It is. There is no demonstrable evidence of a post-death condition for organic beings nor does the organizational structure of the Orrery of Worlds allow the multiverse to conceal what would have to be an exceedingly large hidden dimension."

"You're different," her lab parter chortles. Then she stares into Black's eyes for a long time. 

"Bad different?"

The girl shrugs and her caramel-covered skin furrows on her forehead.

"Just different, I think. Good different, maybe. Not sure. I'm Maggie. Maggie Sawyer. Well, I'm different too."

\-----

Black flops down into the bed of Kara's truck. It's dusk now. The man with the beard can aks her no more questions. The strange girl named Maggie is safely back at her aunt's house. 

"Rao, those humans are exhausting," Black groans. "They were extremely curious about my feelings."

"Which you'd rather not talk about?" Violet prods.

"Which I don't think I have," Black admits. "Or else I have them but they're out of reach. Does that make sense? That my feelings are...hiding?"

Lena huffs.

"I'm a Luthor, darling," she drawls. "I know exactly what you mean. Red made a friend, she said."

_Rage. Rage itself, raw, animal, mindless...made a friend?_

"I did. He was dying so I killed him but...I think we were friends, for a short time. It was nice."

"Hope," Kara decides. "Hope for us all."

Black groans. Red groans. Violet shrugs. Lena smiles.

It's enough. Lena smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, Mr. Catholic School Therapy Guy, just because she's the physical manifestation of an emotion doesn't mean she can access her feelings. Dial it back, buddy!  
> \-----  
> Hi, Maggie! Thanks for coming. Now we can have someone introduce Lena to the rebellious teen girl culture of the early 1960s. Good to have you on the team!  
> \-----  
> Unfortunately, Black is using the Lena Luthor system of mental health. Extremely unhealthy repression and compartmentalization. She's only a being meant to dispense death without remorse, pity, or the slightest reaction. I'm sure it'll be fine when she cracks...


End file.
